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

Chapter Five: Waste is a crime

Waste can be minimised by teams tackling one project at a time, not delaying bug fixes, and preventing people from working more than forty hours a week

Quick Summary
  • Teams should tackle one project at a time to limit the amount of efforted that is wasted switching focus
  • Teams should fix problems when they arise - if bugs are dealt with straight away they can be fixed in a fraction of the time
  • Don't let team members work more than forty hours a week - they will actually get less done 

Main Points

The main causes of waste at work are multitasking, work in progress, not fixing problems when they arise, working long hours, and various forms of unreasonableness such as setting unreasonable goals and expectations. In particular, studies have shown that humans are terrible at multitasking. The same is true of teams. If a team works on two projects simultaneously, 20 percent of their time is wasted on switching contexts. Working on five projects simultaneously leads to 75 percent waste. Teams should tackle one project at a time. 'By just doing one thing exclusively before moving on, the work takes little more than half the time.'

Chapter Overview

Doing half of something is essentially the same as doing nothing, because 'you've expended effort but haven’t created any value'. So work in progress is also considered waste and this is why scrum aims to have a potentially releasable product increment at the end of each sprint. Additionally, teams should fix problems when they arise. One study looked at how long it took developers to fix a bug if they did it right away versus if they tried to fix it a few weeks later. It took them over twenty times longer if they waited to fix it three weeks later.

Other interesting stuff

A study in 1990s found that individual peak productivity actually falls at a little bit less than forty hours a week. This is because of a phenomenon known as “ego depletion.” Any choice involves an energy cost. So there's a limited number of sound decisions you can make in any one day. As you make more and more, you erode your ability to make sound decisions, resulting in more mistakes. When people work for more than forty hours a week, they get less work done overall. Finally, as an antidote to the types of waste identified in the chapter, Scrum is a light-weight process that tries to eliminate the pointless waste that can often seem like it's a part and parcel of work.

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