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

Chapter Seven: Happiness

Teams can quickly triple their productivity by understanding what will make them happier and focusing on one small improvement each sprint

Quick Summary

  • Triple team productivity over just a few sprints simply by asking them what makes them happier and acting on it
  • Quantify happiness - be scientific about it and compare it to actual performance. Happiness is a predictor of future performance.
  • At the end of each sprint, use a 'retrospective' to identify one small improvement that will make the team happier, and figure out how to measure success in the next retro.

Main Points

'People aren’t happy because they’re successful; they’re successful because they’re happy'. Not only does happiness predict future performance, but performance improves even if people are only a little bit happier. Therefore, teams should ask themselves the following questions at the end of each sprint.

1. On a scale from 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in the company?
2. On the same scale, how do you feel about the company as a whole?
3. Why do you feel that way?
4. What one thing would make you happier in the next Sprint?

The team can then decide on a single, top improvement to act upon and make it the most important thing to do in the next sprint. And define the acceptance criteria - "how will we know when it's been achieved." This approach makes it easy in the next retrospective to see if the team has achieved kaizen, or "continuous improvement".

Chapter Overview

Helping teams identify what makes the happy, and acting upon it can triple team productivity. The three key elements that tend to make people happy are: autonomy, mastery and purpose. A powerful catalyst in achieving these is transparency. Everything should be visible to everyone, every salary, every financial and every expenditure. At a team level, the scrum board provides transparency. In essence, this is 'just a bunch of sticky notes on a whiteboard'. Everyone can see who's working on what, and when it's done as a sticky note moves across the columns of the board: To Do, Doing and Done.

Other interesting stuff

In the 2012 January-February, the Harvard Business Review focused on happiness. They found that people who were 'thriving' performed 16 percent better than their peers, had 125 percent less burnout, were 32 percent more committed, and 46 percent more satisfied with their jobs. They were healthier too, and more likely to get promoted. Although Scrum helps teams achieve happiness, it can result in complacency of "happy bubbles". This is when a team stops improving. To counter act this, measure velocity every sprint. If there isn't positive growth, re-focus the team on how to improve it.

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