Douglas Goldstein: Jeff Sutherland is the inventor and co-creator of Scrum: The Art
of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
Can you give us the summary on one foot of what Scrum is all about?
Jeff Sutherland: When I was working with teams, you know I had a lot of experience both in
the military and then I was a medical school professor and wound up working in a large
bank and their teams were having trouble getting stuff finished on time.
I noticed they were doing some of the things that fighter pilots would do when they were
early training, they couldn’t land the airplane at the end of the runway so they have to keep
practicing and practicing.
So I said “You guys can’t land a project.
I’m going to show you how to land a project.”
So we have to do it in short intervals.
We have to have small teams, we have to have a clear backlog of what we are going to do
that’s prioritized by value and at the end of every week, whatever we’re doing needs
to be done and if it’s a software it needs to be live, if it’s a sales proposal it
needs to be shipped, you know whatever it is we are going to land it every week, just
like an aircraft in an aircraft carrier.
I took the worse business unit in a bank that was losing the most money and in less than
six months, it became the most profitable business unit in the bank.
That was the first prototype of what today we call Scrum, small teams doing things in
short iterations, clearly prioritizing by what the end user or the customer or the receiver
value wants and then delivering it consistently over and over again in short timeframes.
Douglas Goldstein: One
of the things that you’ve actually pointed and you wrote in the book is this concept
of looking at the system on a weekly basis so you can constantly readjust or fix things
as they go wrong.
I often tell people that when I’m talking to them about their own finance, I say “Once
a week sit down with your spouse and look at what’s going on.”
These same principles apply and the ultra-big side as they do in a family unit?
Jeff Sutherland: Families use scrum working with their children.
There’s actually a YouTube video on that.
Couples use it for marriages.
Start-ups use it to get going.
Large companies like General Electric or 3M are using it for hundreds or thousands of
people.
One of the interesting things about it is it applies on any scale but the principle
is always the same, there are certain processes which are unpredictable and you can’t be
sure that things are going to happen the way you want them to happen and that means you
have to in short intervals, inspect and adapt over and over again and if you do that you
get much better results.
Douglas Goldstein: The counter to that I think is what the economist, Fama said, I think
won a Nobel prize, that the way to handle money is to look at it like soap which is
the more you touch it the less you have.
So how does that jive with what you are saying?
In other words if people for example look at their investment portfolio and they constantly
adjust, they are going to be tempted to always sell or buy or move things around and it sounds
to me like that would be a good idea maybe in a business when you are working on a project
but does that apply to your investments as well?
Jeff Sutherland: It’s interesting because I agree with the Nobel Prize winner.
You know if you move your money around without knowing what you are doing, you are liable
to lose money, but there are some people that make a ton of money.
So if you look at the best traders and watch what they do, they look like the start up
CEOs that venture capitals invest in, they have this incredible vision, they are totally
tenacious, they are going to cross the ocean and land on the opposite shore no matter what
but to get there, they need to tack with the wind, they need to change in this direction
then change in that direction but they are always changing to reach the objective.
I’ve read about some of the great traders, they talk about how they feel and how they
are thinking and you know they feel the pulse, the energy and they know when to strike and
consistently make a ton of money but for the average investor, just changing on a whim
that’s a sure way to lose a lot
of money.
Douglas Goldstein: If you are looking at the big picture of any project or any investment
portfolio which is for example “I’m trying to invest for the long term so I can retire”
how do you control yourself?
I think it’s more of an emotional question, how do you control yourself so you don’t
over trade or over move your pieces?
Jeff Sutherland: I think we go back to the world’s greatest fighter John Boyd and he
said when he engaged in combat, somehow he almost went out of himself and had this kind
of three dimensional picture of a great sphere of activity and these planes move really fast,
they can go in and out of site in a couple of seconds and from that advantage point,
he could observe what was happening in real time, he could position himself and react
really fast.
He came up with this idea observe, orient, decide and act and the cycle time of making
that action is critical.
So I think with a grand chess master, back up, they have this larger vision of the game
that the average person doesn’t.
Based on their larger vision of what may happen, they orient themselves, they decide what to
do and then they act to the tactical level and they are doing this very fast and to the
naïve user, it looks like they are just whipping pieces around but actually it’s part of
a grand vision they have.
Douglas Goldstein: Now you’ve written and you’ve spoken with thousands of people around
the world, one of the problems I would say that I find is a lot of people understand
what they should do, they just don’t want to do it, they don’t want to become more
efficient or they can’t get themselves to do it.
What do you say, how do you encourage someone, from simply saving $100 a week to changing
the way you run your business, how do you inspire them?
Jeff Sutherland: Lots of issues in life are kind of like losing weight.
You know what you need to do but it is really difficult to do it and it requires discipline.
So the whole idea of Scrum is to make your objectives really clear and prioritize what
you are going to do and make them visible.
We get them on a board on the wall with sticky notes and we are constantly trying to move
those sticky notes, we’re doing this and then we are done, and then we do it one by
one and we keep doing it and so the discipline of organizing and visualizing what you are
going to do keeps pulling you back to your goal and this works for any certain thing,
for your goals in life, for your goals of losing weight, for getting the kids to do
their chores, having that visualization, the objective, the prioritization that constantly
refocus.
It is critical.
There’s something about sticky notes that it’s physical, it’s tactile, the process
of grabbing something and moving it registers at a muscle level that just an intellectual
checklist doesn’t do.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people learn more about scrum, about the work that you are doing
and follow you?
Jeff Sutherland: They can learn about the work we are doing with our clients by going
to www.scruminc.com and of course the best thing to do is go to Amazon and search for
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time and they can read the book that
some people said has changed their life.