Book Notes from 'Scrum The art of doing twice the work in half the time' - By Jeff Sutherland
FBI - Software
development story
- After 9/11 turned into one of
the biggest software debacles of all time.
- CIO - Chad Fulgham : FBI
- 9/11 Commission couldn’t get
access to the very information they were supposed to analyze.
- The report singled out lack
of technical logical sophistication
- The key reason failed prior
to 9/11 -
- The FBI's information
systems were woefully inadequate.
- The FBI lacked the ability
to know what it knew.
- There was no effective
mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge.
- It wasn’t that the FBI didn’t
have smart people, or the right personnel in place, or the right
technology.
- It wasn’t because of work
ethic or the right competitive juices.
- It was because of the way
people were working.
- Gantt Charts - waterfall
method
- Every single step in a
project is laid out in detail
- Every milestone, every
delivery date.
- The only problem with these
charts - they are always, always
wrong.
- There are people whose only
job is to update these charts.
- Eisenhower - planning for
combat is important, but once that first shot is fired, your plans go up
in smoke.
A New Way of
Thinking
- The new approach is called
Scrum
- There are two ways of doing
things.
- The old waterfall method
that wastes hundreds of millions of dollars and often doesn’t deliver
anything,
- The new way - with fewer
people, in less time can deliver more stuff with higher quality at lower
cost.
- Giants at Google, Amazon and
Salesforce.com this framework has shifted how people get things done.
- Looked at how people actually
work - rather than how they say they work.
- Looked deeply at the best
teams within those companies
- What made them superior
- What made them different
- Why do some teams achieve
greatness and other mediocrity
- The way a team works together
to move the ball down the field.
- Careful alignment, unity of
purpose, and clarity of goals
- Management wants two things
on any project.
- Every project involves
discovery of problems and bursts of inspirations.
- Scrum embraces uncertainty
and creativity
- It places structure around
the learning process, enabling teams to assess both what they have created
and what how they created it.
- Scrum harnesses how teams
actually work.
- Give them the tools to
self-organize and rapidly improve both speed of work and quality of work.
- When you start a project
- Why not regularly check in
- See if what you doing is
headed in the right direction.
- And if its what people want.
- That is whats called -
"Inspect and Adapt" cycle.
- Stop doing what youre doing
- Review what you've done
- See if it's still what you
should be doing
- And how you might do it
better.
- The results can be so
dramatic that leading research and analysis firms now say the old style of
work is obsolete.
- Scrum offers too big a
competitive advantage not to use it.
- "The results are
indisputable. Companies have two choices: change or die"
Fixing the FBI
- The first problem the FBI
faced with Sentinel was contracts
- The first week they did what
a lot of people would do - printed out requirements
- No one actually reads all
those thousand pages
- They cant - that’s the point
- they’ve set up a system that forces them to endorse a fantasy.
- That tall stack of futility
is one of the reasons Scrum can be such a powerful change for people.
- No one should spend their
lives on meaningless work.
- Not only is it not good
business, it kills the soul.
- What will bring the most
value to the project - do those things first.
- 80% of the value of any
software is in 20% of the features.
- Making people prioritize by
value forces them to produce that 20% first.
- The FBI stated that it will
employ agile to complete the development of Sentinel.
- Agile declares the following
- People over processes
- Products that actually work
over documents what the product is supposed to do.
- Collaborating with customers
over negotiating with them
- Responding to change over
following a plan.
- Scrum in the framework to
put these values into practice.
- I'll know what the date will
be when I see how much the team improves
- How fast they'll get it
- How much they will
accelerate.
- Team members figure out what
would stop them from accelerating.
- Production should flow
swiftly and calmly throughout the process.
- One of managements key tasks
is to identify and remove impediments to that flow.
- Everything that stands in the
way is a waste.
- For Scrum to really take off
- management needs to understand in its bones - that impediments are
nearly criminal.
- Scrum works by setting
sequential goals that must be completed in a fixed length of time.
- Are they headed in the right
direction.
- Is what they are planning to
do next really what they should be doing.
- In Scrum we call these cycles
'Sprints'
- At the end of each sprint.
The team comes together and shows what they have accomplished.
- They begin to learn how fast
they can go.
- After they have shown what
they have done.
- They discuss not what they
did - but how they did it.
- They ask "How can we
work together better in the next sprint"
- Measure the velocity of each
team measured over a few sprints and then see how much they could improve.
- Besides learning how fast the
teams are going - they also wanted to
know what impediments were slowing them down.
- Working better and smarter.
- They got better at working
together.
- They figured out what was
slowing them down, and after each cycle, each Sprint, they'd try to get
rid of them.
- The Most powerful part of
Scrum from his point of view -
Demo's
- A demonstrable product on a
frequent basis.
- Scrum is not about the
developers - its about the customers and stakeholders.
- Pig is committed and a
chicken is interested.
- Scrum is that the pigs are
the ones who are totally committed to the project and are responsible for
its outcome.
- The chickens are the people
who are informed of its progress, the stakeholders.
- The world is constantly
getting more complicated and the work we do is gaining in complexity at an
ever-increasing rate.