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

Chapter Three: Teams

A good team can outperform a bad team by a ratio of 2000:1. They do it by being transcendent, autonomous and cross functional.

Quick Summary
  • The best teams have three key characteristics: transcendent, autonomous and cross functional
  • Organisations should focus on improving team performance rather than individual performance, it has much more impact
  • Once teams grow larger than eight they take dramatically longer to get things done
Main Points

Talented individuals outpace their peers by a ratio of 10:1. But the fastest teams outpace slow teams by a ratio of 2000:1. So there is a much larger difference in team performance than there is in individual performance. Furthermore, when a team grows larger than eight, its performance dramatically decreases. Groups made of three to seven people require about 25 per cent of the effort of groups of nine or twenty to get the same amount of work done. The brain can't keep track of what everyone is doing, so we slow down as we try to figure it out.

Chapter Overview

The best teams are transcendent, autonomous and cross-functional. Transcendent - because they have a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary. The decision to not be average, but great, changes what they're capable of. Autonomous - because they have the power to make their own decisions about how they do their jobs, and make those decisions stick. Cross-functional - because they have all the skills needed to complete a project, and those skills reinforce each other.

Other interesting stuff

We are all susceptible to something called 'Fundament attribution error'. While we all perceive ourselves as responding to a situation, we see others as motivated by their character. When we talk about others, we talk about their inherent qualities, rather than those qualities in relationship to an external environments. In fact, it's interactions with our environment that drive our behaviour. Scrum accepts that we're all creatures of the system we find ourselves in, and tries to examine that system and fix any flaws. 

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