Jeff Sutherland > Quotes

“No Heroics. If you need a hero to get things done, you have a problem. Heroic effort should be viewed as a failure of planning.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong—it does.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“The Scrum Master, the person in charge of running the process, asks each team member three questions: 1. What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint? 2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint? 3. What obstacles are getting in the team’s way? That’s it. That’s the whole meeting.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“It was the Scrum Master’s job to guide the team toward continuous improvement—to ask with regularity, “How can we do what we do better?” Ideally, at the end of each iteration, each Sprint, the team would look closely at itself—at its interactions, practices, and processes—and ask two questions: “What can we change about how we work?” and “What is our biggest sticking point?” If those questions are answered forthrightly, a team can go faster than anyone ever imagined.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Doing half of something is, essentially, doing nothing.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Greatness can’t be imposed; it has to come from within. But it does live within all of us.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“People aren't happy because they're successful. They're successful because they're happy.”
― Jeff Sutherland

“That absolute alignment of purpose and trust is something that creates greatness.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“The human mind has limits. We can only remember so many things; we can really only concentrate on one thing at a time. This tendency—for the process of fixing things to get harder as more time elapses—represents a similar limitation. When you’re working on a project, there’s a whole mind space that you create around it. You know all the different reasons why something is being done. You’re holding a pretty complicated construct in your head. Re-creating that construct a week later is hard. You have to remember all the factors that you were considering when you made that choice. You have to re-create the thought process that led you to that decision. You have to become your past self again, put yourself back inside a mind that no longer exists. Doing that takes time. A long time. Twenty-four times as long as it would take if you had fixed the problem when you first discovered it.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Making people prioritize by value forces them to produce that 20 percent first. Often by the time they’re done, they realize they don’t really need the other 80 percent, or that what seemed important at the outset actually isn’t.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“the people who multitask the most just can’t focus.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? And question whether there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and what might be keeping you from doing that.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“In software development there’s a term called “Brooks’s Law” that Fred Brooks first coined back in 1975 in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Put simply, Brooks’s Law says “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”8 This has been borne out in study after study.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Each cycle J.J. would talk to the team and ask three very simple questions: What did you do since the last time we talked? What are you going to do before we talk again? And what is getting in your way?”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Agile Manifesto.” It declared the following values: people over processes; products that actually work over documenting what that product is supposed to do; collaborating with customers over negotiating with them; and responding to change over following a plan. Scrum is the framework I built to put those values into practice. There is no methodology.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“observar, orientarse, decidir y actuar. Asimilaba”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: El arte de hacer el doble de trabajo en la mitad de tiempo

“The thing that cripples communication saturation is specialization—the number of roles and titles in a group. If people have a special title, they tend to do only things that seem a match for that title. And to protect the power of that role, they tend to hold on to specific knowledge.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“aunque planear el combate es importante, los planes se evaporan en cuanto suena el primer disparo.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: El arte de hacer el doble de trabajo en la mitad de tiempo

“Number of Simultaneous Projects Percent of Time Available per Project Loss to Context Switching 1 100% 0% 2 40% 20% 3 20% 40% 4 10% 60% 5 5% 75%”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Blame Is Stupid. Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems—ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Embrace the unknown! That’s where learning lies! If you’re too afraid to learn, you will never get any better. This is the key to being successful at Scrum: embrace change.”
― Jeff Sutherland, The Power of Scrum

“The problem that I frequently see crop up is that people have a tendency to treat the Daily Stand-up as simply individual reporting. “I did this … I’ll do that”—then on to the next person. The more optimum approach is closer to a football huddle. A wide receiver might say, “I’m having a problem with that defensive lineman,” to which an offensive blocker might respond, “I’ll take care of that. I’ll open that line.” Or the quarterback might say, “Our running game is hitting a wall; let’s surprise them with a pass to the left.” The idea is for the team to quickly confer on how to move toward victory—i.e., complete the Sprint. Passivity is not only lazy, it actively hurts the rest of the team’s performance. Once spotted, it needs to be eliminated immediately.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Never do betas. Never do work that you don’t think is good. You either give your customer something good, or you don’t. There is no ‘try’.”
― Jeff Sutherland, The Power of Scrum

“Often when people talk about great teams, they only talk about that transcendent sense of purpose. But while that’s a critical element, it’s only one leg of the three-legged stool. Just as critical, but perhaps less celebrated, is the freedom to do your job in the way that you think best—to have autonomy. On all great teams, it’s left to the members to decide how to carry out the goals set by those leading the organization.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“If a company isn’t making money, you don’t have a successful venture; you have a hobby.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Hazlo bien a la primera. Cuando cometas un error, corrígelo al instante. Deja lo demás y ocúpate de él. Corregirlo después puede consumir veinte veces más tiempo, o más, que si lo corriges ahora.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: El arte de hacer el doble de trabajo en la mitad de tiempo

“tiempo que el equipo necesita. Cuatro: el responsable del producto debe hacerse cargo del valor. En un contexto de negocios lo que importa son los ingresos. Yo mido a un responsable del producto por los ingresos que produce por “punto” de esfuerzo. Si el equipo produce cuarenta puntos de trabajo a la semana, debo medir cuántos ingresos crea cada punto. Pero la medición de valor podría ser cuántos éxitos tiene un equipo. Sé de un equipo de representantes de la ley que medía el valor por el número de arrestos de criminales buscados que hacía cada semana, y de iglesias que usan Scrum y miden su éxito por lo bien que sirven a su comunidad y si crecen o no. La clave es decidir cuál es la medida de valor y hacer que el responsable del producto asuma el deber de ofrecer cada vez más de él. En Scrum, este tipo de medida es fácil de observar a causa de la increíble transparencia del método. Todo esto es mucho pedir a una sola persona y por eso en proyectos grandes suele haber un equipo de responsables del producto que se ocupan de todas las necesidades. Abundaré en esto más adelante. Primero, para visualizar lo que el responsable del producto debe hacer, me gustaría que te imaginaras en la cabina de un F-86”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: El arte de hacer el doble de trabajo en la mitad de tiempo

“It is not an exaggeration that in a low-growth period such waste is a crime against society more than a business loss. Eliminating waste must be a business’s first objective.4”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Ben-Shahar writes: “We are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey. Society rewards results, not processes; arrivals, not journeys.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Me inspiré a este respecto en el jefe de ingeniería de Toyota. En esta organización, un jefe de ingeniería es responsable de una línea de productos completa, como la de Corolla o Camry. Para ejercer esta función, quienes la asumen deben echar mano del talento de grupos especializados en ingeniería de carrocería, o chasís, o sistema eléctrico y demás. El”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: El arte de hacer el doble de trabajo en la mitad de tiempo