Book Chapter Summary | Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (New York, 2014) by Jeff Sutherland - Chapter Two: The Origins of Scrum

Chapter Two: The Origins of Scrum

The Scrum development process draws on the findings of a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper, which looked at how product development teams worked in some of the most high performing companies

Quick Summary
  • Great teams are cross-functional, autonomous, empowered with a transcendent purpose
  • Look outward for answers - complex adaptive systems learn from their environment
  • Follow the principle of Shu Ha Ri - learn the forms and rules, then introduce innovations, before living the forms and rules effortlessly
Main Points

The Scrum development process emerged from the findings of a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper. The paper concluded that the traditional waterfall approach to product development was fundamentally flawed. Instead, the world’s most productive and innovative companies had teams that were cross-functional. The teams also had autonomy to make their decisions, and shared a transcendent purpose bigger than themselves. Managers were servant leaders, focused on getting obstacles out of their teams' way, rather than telling them what to do. The best teams acted as though they were in a rugby scrum “… the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field.”

Chapter Overview

Air Force training, pioneering approaches to robotics combined with the 1986 Harvard Business Review paper gave Sutherland the inspiration to find a better approach to projects than the traditional waterfall methodology. It also draws upon the Deming PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act). This is a method for always looking for something to improve. 'How you get there is to be constantly creating experiments to see if you can achieve improvement. If I try this method, is it better? How about this one? What if I change just this one thing?'

Other interesting stuff

Scrum has its origins in Japanese manufacturing techniques adopted following the Second World War. During the American occupation, the Japanese senior management were fired and replaced with line managers who were promoted from the ranks. W. Edwards Deming trained hundreds of engineers in what is called “statistical process control.” Essentially, this calls for teams to measure exactly what is being done, how well, and to strive for "continuous improvement".

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