Podcasts about scrum the art

Bio Dr. Jeff Sutherland is the inventor and co-creator of Scrum, the most widely used Agile framework across the globe.  Originally used for software development, Jeff has also pioneered the application of the framework to multiple industries and disciplines. Today, Scrum is applied to solve complex projects in start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. Scrum companies consistently respond to market demand, to get results and drive performance at speeds they never thought possible. Jeff is committed to developing the Agile leadership practices that allow Scrum to scale across an enterprise.   Dr. Sutherland is the chairman and founder of Scrum Inc. He is a signatory of the Agile manifesto and coauthor of the Scrum Guide and the creator Scrum@Scale. Jeff continues to teach, create new curriculum in the Agile Education Program and share best practices with organizations around the globe. He is the founder of Scrum Inc. and coauthor of, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, that has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide.    Social Media:                 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffsutherland                 Twitter: @jeffsutherland Website: Scrum Inc https://scruminc.com               Books/ Articles: The Scrum Guide by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber http://www.scrumguides.org/index.html Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland The Scrum Fieldbook by JJ Sutherland Agile Competitors and Virtual Organisations by Steven Goldman, Roger Nagel and Kenneth Preiss https://www.amazon.co.uk/Agile-Competitors-Virtual-Organizations-Engineering/dp/0471286508 Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster Moving World by John P. Kotter Leading Change by John P. Kotter Process Dynamics, Modeling and Control by Babatunde A. Ogunnaike and Harmon W. Ray A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game by Jeff Sutherland, James Coplien, Mark den Hollander, et al    Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku: Hello everyone, my guest today is Dr Jeff Sutherland. He is the inventor and co-creator of Scrum, the most widely used Agile Framework across the globe. Originally used for Software Development, Jeff has also pioneered the application of the framework to multiple industries and disciplines. Today, Scrum is applied to deliver complex projects in startups and Fortune 100 companies. Dr Jeff Sutherland is the Chairman and Founder of Scrum Inc. He is a signatory of the Agile Manifesto and co-author of the Scrum Guide and the creator of Scrum at Scale. Jeff continues to teach, create new curriculum in the Agile education programme and share best practices with organisations around the globe. He has authored and co-authored a number of books which include Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time – which has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. In this episode, Dr Sutherland shares the backstory of how he and Ken Schwaber developed the Scrum framework. I was pleasantly surprised and proud to learn that one of the inspirations behind the current Scrum framework we now have was the work of Prof Babatunde Ogunnike, given my Nigerian heritage. Dr Sutherland also talked about the importance of Agile Leadership and his current focus on helping organisations fix bad Scrum implementations. I'm sure you'll uncover some useful nuggets in this episode. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dr Sutherland.   Ula Ojiaku: Thank you, Dr. Sutherland, for joining us on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here. Jeff Sutherland: Glad to be here. Looking forward to it. Ula Ojiaku: Fantastic. So could you tell us about yourself? Jeff Sutherland: Well, I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. And I always felt that I would go to West Point of the United States Military Academy, even at a very young age. And I finally made it there. I spent four years there. And I went on to a program where a certain number of cadets could join the Air Force. And I told the Air Force, if they made me a fighter pilot, I would move into the Air Force, which I did. I spent 11 years as a fighter pilot in the Air Force. And most of the operational aspects of Scrum actually come from that training. My last tour in the Air Force was actually at the US Air Force Academy, I was a professor of mathematics. And I had gone to Stanford University in preparation for that position. And I had worked closely with the, at the time he was Head of the Department of Psychiatry, became the Dean of Stanford who had studied under my father-in-law, he had become an MD under my father-in-law, who was a brilliant physician. And I was working on research papers with him, both at Stanford and at the Air Force Academy. And I asked him for guidance. And I said, I'm thinking about, given all the work we've done in the medical area. Starting in Stanford, I'm thinking maybe becoming a doctor - become an MD. And he strongly recommended against that he said, ‘you'll just go backwards in your career, what you need to do is you build on everything you've done so far. And what you have is your fighter pilot experience, your experience as a statistician, and a mathematician, you want to build on that.' So, I had already started into a doctoral program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, which was not far from the Air Force Academy. And so, I talked to my department Chairman there who offered me a position in the department running a large research grant, funded by the National Cancer Institute and so, I decided to exit the Airforce and join the medical school. While I was finishing up my doctoral degree. And as soon as my doctorate was finished, I became a professor of Radiology, preventive medicine and biometrics. I was a joint across multiple departments. And I was doing mathematical research on modeling, particularly the human cell on a supercomputer, (to) determine what caused cancer. And to do that required extensive mathematical research as well as the medical research. But at the end of the day, what we found was for any complex adaptive system, like a human cell, or a person or a team, they go through different states. And they're moved from one state to the next by some kind of intervention. And so, if you understand what causes those changes… turned out in the case of cancer, there were four different states that led to a tumor. And in every state, there were certain interventions, and if you knew what they were, you could prevent them and prevent cancer. Or you could even, to my surprise, take a cancer cell and make it go backward into a normal cell. So, this fundamental understanding is the theory behind Scrum. So, while I'm doing this all at the medical school, a large banking company came by and said, ‘you know, over the medical school, you guys have all the knowledge about the technologies; the new technology, we're using (for) banking, you're using for research.' And they said, ‘you guys have all the knowledge but we have all the money and they made me an offer to come join the bank'    Ula Ojiaku: [Laughs]You couldn't refuse Jeff Sutherland: Not just me, it was my family. So, I wind up as Vice President for Advanced Systems, which was effectively was the CTO for 150 banks that we were running across North America.   Each was, you know, a dozen, 50, 100 branches. And of course, we were mainly doing the software, installation and support to run the banking operation, which is largely computer stuff – (this) is what banks run off. And as we're building these systems with hundreds and hundreds of developers, one of the first things I noticed is that all the projects were late. And I look at what they're doing. And they're using this process where they spend, you know, six months defining requirements, and then they put all the requirements into a Gantt chart. And then they, they plan on taking six months to build something, but it's never done. Because as soon as they start testing that they find there's all kinds of things that are broken. So, virtually every single project of the bank is late. So, as a head of technology, one day I walked into the CEO's office and I said, ‘Ron,  have you noticed all your projects are late?' He said, ‘Yes'. He says, ‘Every morning at least five CIOs or CEOs of the banks, they call me up.' And he says, ‘they scream at me.' I said, ‘wow', I said, ‘You know, it's going to get worse, not better. Because these guys are using this, these Gantt Charts.' And I showed him one. And then being a mathematician, I mathematically proved that every project would be late at the bank. And he was stunned. And he said, ‘what should I do?' I said, ‘we need a completely different operating system in the bank.' This is back in 1983. ‘Let's take one business unit. Let's take the one that's losing the most money, okay, the worst business unit' Ula Ojiaku: They have nothing to lose then. Jeff Sutherland: And it was the automated teller division that was rolling out cash machines all over North America. It was a new technology and they had a ton of problems. So, I said, ‘let's take that unit and every one, sales, market, support, installation, we're going to split them down into small teams. And we're going to have Product Marketing come in on Monday with a backlog prioritized by business value. And at the end of the week, on Friday, we're going to deploy to 150 banks.' ‘And I'm going to train them how to land a project every week, just like I trained fighter pilots to land aircraft. I'm going to give them a burndown chart, we're going to throw away the Gantt Chart, I'm going to give them a burndown chart to show them how to land the project.' So, he said, ‘Well, that's gonna be a big headache.' I said, ‘look, the bank needs to be fixed.' He said, ‘Okay, you got it.' So, I took that unit. I told them, ‘I know it's gonna take several weeks,' today we call them sprints, ‘for you to be successful.' Because as new pilots, trained to land, these high-performance jets, they tend to come in high and then they have to come around and try to land again, they over and over, they practice until they can nail it. And it took them six weeks, six sprints to actually nail the end of the week (and) deploy (to) 150 banks. But within six months, it became… it went from the worst business unit in the bank to the most profitable business unit in the bank. And the senior management said, ‘you know, Jeff, here's another 20 million dollars to throw at whatever that thing you're doing  it's the most profitable thing in the bank, we're gonna put more money in that. So that was the first prototype of what we call today Scrum at Scale. Now, I've been CTO of 11, or CTO or CEO of 11 different companies. And for the next 10 years, I prototyped that model and advanced technology teams until in 1993, at a company called Easel Corporation, we found that because of the tooling we were building and selling to customers, we needed to build the tool with what today we call Agile Practice. Ula Ojiaku: Yes Jeff Sutherland: And we need to train the customer to use the tool by having teams do an agile practice. So, in order to train our customers properly in 1993, we actually had to formalize what I've been prototyping for 10 years. And we wrote it down and at the time we were reading this paper, we're going through 1000 papers in the journals I, you know, I had done many new technology. And, in every one of them, you have to read everything that's ever been done so that you can go beyond. You can use everything that's been done, but then you go beyond, okay? Ula Ojiaku: Yeah Jeff Sutherland:  So, it's a tremendous amount of research to launch new technology. And at about the 300th paper in our file, it was a paper out of the Harvard Business Review, which really surprised me, by two Japanese Business School professors, Professors Takeuchi and Nonaka. And in there, they described the best teams in the world. They were lean hardware teams that reminded them of a game of rugby, they said, ‘we're going to call what they're doing Scrum Project Management.' So, I said to the team, ‘we need a name for this thing that we're going to train our customers in, and let's call it Scrum.' And off we went. So, for the next two years, we were actually using Scrum within Easel deploying products. But it was not public, to the general industry. And Easel got acquired by a larger company. And at that time, I felt that this needed to be rolled out into the industry because we had benchmarked it with the best tooling in the world from the leading productivity company, and showed that it was… that (it) went 10 times faster. The quality was 10 times better, which is what you need for a new technology innovation. And so, I felt it was ready to go to the industry as a whole. So, I called up an old friend, Ken Schwaber. And he was a CEO of a traditional Project Management software company, a waterfall (methodology). He sold these methodologies with 303 ring binders, a software package that would make Gantt Charts. So, I said, ‘Ken, I want you to come up and see the Scrum, because it actually works and that stuff you're selling doesn't work – it makes projects late.' And he agreed to come in, he actually came up, he met with me. He stayed for two weeks inside the company, working, observing the Scrum team. And at the end of those two weeks, he said, ‘Jeff, you're right. This really works - it's pretty much the way I run my company.' He said, ‘if I ran my company with a Gantt Chart, we would have been bankrupt a long time ago.' So, I said, ‘well, why don't you sell something to work that works instead of inflicting more damage on the industry?' So, he said so we said ‘okay, how (do) we do it?' I said, ‘it needs to be open source, it needs to be free.' Ken felt we needed to take the engineering practices, many of which appear today in extreme programming… Ula Ojiaku: Yes Jeff Sutherland: …and let Kent Beck (creator of eXtreme Programming, XP) run with them because Kent had been sending me emails, ‘Jeff, send me every...', he had been following the development of Scrum, ‘…send me everything on Scrum, I'm building a new process. I want to use anything that you've done before and not try to reinvent anything.' So, he (Ken Schwaber) said, ‘let Kent take the engineering practices, we'll focus on the team process itself.' And we agreed to write the first paper on this to present at a big conference later that year. And writing that paper was quite interesting. Ken visited DuPont Chemical Corporation, the leading Chemical Process Engineers there that they had hired out of academia to stop chemical plants from blowing up. And when Ken met with them, they said, describe what we were doing in the software domain. They said, ‘you know, well, that process that traditional project management is a Predictive Process Control System. We have that in the chemical industry.' ‘But it's only useful if the variation in the process running is less than 4%.' They said, ‘do you have less than 4% change in requirements while you're building software?' Ken says, ‘no, of course not! It's over 50%!' And they started laughing at him. They said, ‘your project's going to be exploding all over the place.' ‘Because every chemical plant that has blown up has been somebody applying a predictive control system to a system that has high variability. You need to completely retrain industry to use Empirical Process Control, which will stop your projects from blowing up. And they said, here it is, here's the book, they had the standard reference book for Chemical Process Engineering. And in there, there's a chapter on Empirical Process Control, which is based on transparency, inspection, and adapting to what's happening in real time. Okay, so those are the three pillars of Scrum that are today at the base of the Scrum guide. Ula Ojiaku: Do you still remember the title of the book that the chemical engineers recommended to Mr. Schwaber by any chance? Jeff Sutherland: Yeah, so I have a, when I do training, I have a slide that has a picture of the book (Process Dynamics, Modelling and Control). It's written by Ogunnaike and Ray. But that is the root of the change that's gone on in the industry. And so then from 1995, forward, Ken and I started working together, I was still CTO of companies. And I would get him to come in as a consultant and work with me. And we'd implement and enhance the Scrum implementations in company after company after company. Until 2001, of course, Scrum was expanding but Extreme Programming in 2001, was actually the most widely deployed. They were only two widely-deployed agile processes at the time of Scrum and Extreme Programming. Extreme Programming was the biggest. And so, the Agile Manifesto meeting was convened. And it had 17 people there, but three of them were Scrum guys - that had started up Scrum, implemented it in companies, four of them were the founders of Extreme Programming. And the other 10 were experts who have written books on adaptive software development or, you know, lightweight processes, so, industry experts. And we, we talked for a day and everybody explained what they were doing and there was a lot of arguments and debate. And at the end of the day, we agreed because of this book, Agile Competitors, a book about 100 hardware companies - lean hardware companies, that have taken Lean to the next level, by involving the customer in the creation of the product. And we said, ‘we think that we all need to run under one umbrella. And we should call that Agile.' Ula Ojiaku: So, did you actually use the word umbrella in your (statement)? Oh, okay. Jeff Sutherland: Often, people use that right? Ula Ojiaku: Yes, yes Jeff Sutherland: Because at the time, we had Agile and Extreme Programming, and now everybody's trying to come up with their own flavor, right?  All under the same umbrella of ‘Agile'. And that caused the both Scrum and Extreme Programming started to expand even more, and then other kinds of processes also. But Scrum rapidly began to take dominant market share, Scrum today is about 80% of what people call Agile. The reason being, number one, it was a technology that was invented and created to be 10 times better. So, it was a traditional new technology developed based on massive amounts of research. So, it worked. But number two, it also scaled it worked very well for many teams. I mean, there are many companies today like Amazon that have thousands of Scrum teams. And Extreme Programming was really more towards one team. And (reason number) three, you could distribute it across the world. So, some of the highest performing teams are actually dozens of teams or hundreds across multiple continents. And because of those three characteristics, it's (Scrum has) dominated the market. So that brings us to in 2006, I was asked by a Venture Capital firm to help them implement Scrum in their companies, they felt that Scrum was a strategic advantage for investment. And not only that, they figured out that it should be implemented everywhere they implemented it within the venture group, everybody doing Scrum. And their goal was to double their return on investment compared to any other venture capital firm. They pretty much have done that by using Scrum, but then they said, ‘Jeff, you know, we're hiring you as a consultant into our companies. And you're a CTO of a healthcare company right now. And we don't want to build a healthcare company, we want to build a Scrum company.' ‘So, why don't you create Scrum Inc. right here in the venture group? We'll support it, we'll do the administrative support. We'll write you a check - whatever you want.' So, I said, ‘well, I'm not going to take any money because I don't need it. I understand how that works. If the venture capital firm owns your company, then (in the) long term, you're essentially their slave for several years. So, I'm not taking any money. But I will create the company within the venture group. If you provide the administrative support, I'll give you 10% of the revenue and you can do all the finances and all that kind of stuff. So, that's the way Scrum Inc. was started to enable an investment firm to launch or support or invest in many dozens of Scrum companies. Ula Ojiaku: That's awesome Jeff Sutherland: And today, we're on the sixth round of investment at OpenView Venture Partners, which was the company the six round is 525 million. There's a spin out from OpenView that I'm working with, that has around this year, 25 million. And over the years, just co-investing with the venture group I have my own investment fund of 50 million. So, we have $570 million, right this year 2021 that we're putting into Scrum companies. Agile companies, preferably Scrum. Ula Ojiaku: Now when you say Scrum companies is it that they facilitate the (Scrum) training and offer consulting services in Scrum or is it that those companies operate and you know, do what they do by adopting Scrum processes? Jeff Sutherland: Today, Scrum Inc sometimes help some of those companies, but in general, those companies are independently implementing Scrum in their organizations.   Ula Ojiaku: Right Jeff Sutherland: And okay, some of them may come to Scrum training, maybe not. But since Scrum is so widely deployed in the industry, Scrum Inc, is only one of 1000 companies doing Scrum training and that sort of stuff. So, they have a wide variety, wide area of where they can get training and also many of the startups, they already know Scrum before they started the company. They are already Agile. So, what we're interested in is to find the company that understands Agile and has the right team players, particularly at the executive level, to actually execute on it. Ula Ojiaku: No matter what the product or services (are)… Jeff Sutherland: Products or services, a lot of them are software tooling companies, but some of them are way beyond that, right? So, turns out that during COVID… COVID was a watershed. The companies that were not agile, they either went bankrupt, or they were crippled. That meant all the Agile companies that could really do this, started grabbing all the market share. And so, many of our companies, their stock price was headed for the moon during COVID. While the non-agile companies were flatlined, or are going out of business, and so the year of COVID was the best business year in the history of venture capital because of Agility. So, as a result, I'm spending half my time really working, investing in companies, and half of my time, working with Scrum (Inc.) and supporting them, helping them move forward. Ula Ojiaku: That's a very impressive resume and career story really Dr. Sutherland. I have a few questions: as you were speaking, you've called Scrum in this conversation, a process, a tooling, the technology. And you know, so for some hardcore Agilists, some people will say, you know, Agile is all about the mindset for you, what would you say that Scrum is it all of these things you've called it or would it be, you know, or it's something (else)...? Jeff Sutherland: So, certainly the (Agile) mindset is important. But from an investment point of view, if the organization can't deliver real value, quickly, agile is just a bunch of nonsense. And we have a huge amount of nonsense out there. In fact, the Standish group has been publishing for decades. 58% of Agile teams are late over budget with unhappy customers. So, when you get these hardcore Agilist, that are talking about mindset, you have to figure out ‘are they in the 42% that actually can do it or are they in the 58% that are crippled?' My major work with Scrum Inc. today is to try to get to fix the bad Scrum out there. That is the biggest problem in the Agile community. People picking up pieces of things, people picking up ideas, and then putting together and then it doesn't work. That is going to that's going to be really bad for agile in the future. If 58% of it continues not to work. So, what we found, I mean, it was really interesting. Several years ago, the senior executive (of) one of the biggest Japanese companies flew to Boston wanted meet with me. And he said to me, ‘the training is not working in Japan for Scrum.' He said, ‘I spent 10 years with Google, in Silicon Valley. So, I know what it looks like what actually works. And I can tell you, it's not working in Japan, because the training is… it's not the training of the Scrum that is high performing. And in fact, our company is 20% owned by Toyota, and we are going to be the trainers of Toyota. And we cannot deliver the training that's currently being given to Toyota, it will not work, it will not fly. And we want to create a company called Scrum Inc. Japan. And we're a multibillion-dollar company, we're ready to invest whatever it takes to make that happen.' To give them the kind of training that will produce the teams that Takeuchi and Nonaka were writing about in the first paper on Scrum. And as we work with them to figure out what needs to be in that training, we found that the Scrum Guide was only 25% of the training. Another 25% was basic Lean concepts and tooling, right? Because the original Scrum paper was all about Lean hardware companies. So Lean is fundamental to Scrum. If you don't understand it, you can't do it. And then third, there are certain patterns of performance that we've developed over the years, we spent 10 years writing a book on patterns - Scrum patterns. And there's about a dozen of those patterns that have to be implemented to get a high performing team. And finally, scaling to multiple teams. It turns out, right about this time I started working with the Japanese, I was at a conference with the Agile Leadership from Intel. And they told me that they'd introduced Scaling Frameworks into Intel division, some of which had more than 500 Scrum teams in the divisions and the Scaling Frameworks had slowed them down. And it made the senior executives furious and they threw them all out and they said, we did not want to hear the word Scrum at Intel anymore. But you guys need to go twice as fast as you're going now. So, they came to me, they said, ‘we're desperate. We have to go twice as fast. We can't even use the word “Scrum”. What should we do?' And they blamed me, they said, ‘Sutherland you're responsible you caused problem, you need to fix it.' So, I started writing down how to do what today we call Scrum at Scale. And everybody, you know, most of those people in the industry were implementing IT scaling frameworks. They were all upset. ‘Why are you writing down another framework?' Well, it's because those IT frameworks do not enable the organization to show Business Agility, and win in the market. And in the best companies in the world, they're being thrown out. So, I've had to write down how do you add, how do you go to hundreds and thousands of Scrum teams - and never slow down as you're adding more and more teams. You know, every team you add is as fast as the first team when you start. Yeah, that's what Scrum at Scale is all about. So, there's two primary things that I'm focused on today. One is to fix all this bad Scrum. Second is to fix the scaling problem. Because it turns out that if you look at the latest surveys from Forbes magazine, and the Scrum Alliance on successful Agile transformations - I learned recently, that almost every company in the world of any significance is going through an Agile transformation or continuing transformation they'd already started years ago. And 53% of them do not meet management expectations. And the MIT Sloan Business Review did an analysis of what happens if an agile transformation fails, and 67% of those companies go out of business. So, this is becoming really serious, right? To be successful today, if you're competing in any significant way, you have to be agile. And number two, if you try to be agile and fail, you have a 67% chance going out of business. And the failure rate is 53%. So, this is the problem that we're wrestling with. And half of that 53% failure is due to the bad Scrum we talked about, but the other half is due because of the leadership not being Agile. Ula Ojiaku: I was just going to say, as you said something about the leadership not being agile. In my experience, you know, as an agile coach in some organizations whilst the teams would embrace you know, Scrum and embrace Agility - the practices and the processes and everything. There's a limit to, you know, how much they can get done… Jeff Sutherland: Absolutely… Ula Ojiaku: …if the leadership are not on board. So… Jeff Sutherland: …you hit this glass ceiling. So, I've been, you know, giving presentations on Agile Transformations around the world. And I can remember multiple times I've had 300 people in the room, say, and I say okay, ‘How many of you are agile, in Agile transformations or continuing the ones you'd started?' Of course, everybody raises their hand. ‘How many of you have waterfall traditional management that expects you to deliver all the old Gantt Chart reports that we always got, and don't understand what you're doing?' There's 300 people in the room and 297 people raised their hand. I said, ‘you need to give your leadership the book by Professor Kotter called Accelerate.' Professor Kotter is one of the leading change experts of the world. Ula Ojiaku: And he also, yeah, He also wrote ‘Leading Change' as well - the book, yes. Jeff Sutherland: And in that book, he says, if the leadership of the Agile part of the organization is traditional in their mindset and requirements, the Agile Transformation will eventually fail 100% of the time. Ula Ojiaku: Those are sobering statistics in terms of, you know, the failure rate and how much of you know the success hinges on business agility and the leadership being agile as well and taking the time to know and care what it means. Yeah. Jeff Sutherland: And what's happening is that the Agile Leadership today, if you look at some of the companies that have been most successful during COVID, one of them is John Deere Corporation, the biggest farm equipment manufacturer in the world, probably the oldest. Their stock price went up more than Amazon during COVID. And the board of directors gave their Agile Leadership, the Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, the highest award in the Corporation for producing that result. So that's another reason I'm trying to communicate to Agile people. The success and survival of your company depends on you. You think your management's going to save you but no, if they are old-style people, they are going to run that company out of business. And you need to either save it before it goes out of business or run to another company before bad things happen. Ula Ojiaku: It's impressive that, you know, John Deere being a farm equipment manufacturer… I think they were ahead of the curve you know, (compared to some of their contemporaries in that industry as well) and embraced agile ways of working. Do you know how their Agile Leadership were able to quantify their contributions to the company? Jeff Sutherland: John Deere started to get Agile more than 10 years ago. So, they've been at it a long time. But in recent years, they really started to build… build internally… Agile leadership, you know, based on my work and they started applying that across the company. I mean, the major focus has not been software actually – it's been in other parts of the company. What has to happen to run a company that's building tractors? Well, there's all kinds of things that have to happen, you know - purchasing, there's legal, there's acquiring all the pieces, it's putting them together at the assembly line, you know, software is a piece of it. You know, that's probably the easiest piece to fix with Agile, it's the rest of the company that's the challenge. They have started doing that really well which is reflected in their stock price. Ula Ojiaku: Amazing. So, you said something about you know, you're out to fix a couple of things, the problem with bad Scrum out there. And, you know, the problem with scaling agile. Jeff Sutherland: Right Ula Ojiaku: So, with respect to the first one, the point about bad Scrum, what in your experience would be the root cause of bad Scrum implementations in organizations? Jeff Sutherland: There're about 11 things, that if you fix them, the team will go twice as fast. And it's multiplicative. So, you know, we have extensive data on, you know, really big companies. What's the difference between the fastest team and the slowest teams? The fastest teams are 2000 times faster than the slowest teams. So why is that? Well, first, the team has to be small. The optimal team size is four or five people. If you have a 10-person team, that's going to take at least 50% longer to get anything done. If you go out, look at the team size, you'll see companies have even not only ten-people teams, they have 15 people in a team, 25 people in a team, okay? Those teams are never gonna meet Agile performance. Second, the backlog needs to be really ready in a sense of small, it's clearly understood, it's properly prioritized. So, you need somebody managing that backlog that can get it right, because we have extensive data for multiple case studies showing the team's production doubles immediately. As soon as you get that backlog right. So you go into many companies, you'll see, there's still arguing about what's the top priority, right? Or everything's top priority. That's just gonna create a massive mess. Third, teams are constantly interrupted. You know, the only teams I know that aren't interrupted are people… these teams and defense contractors working on top secret stuff. And they work in a locked room, the door, it says ‘no managers can enter' and they don't get interrupted. But for the rest of us, there's always somebody coming in wanting something else done. And there's a way to manage that using a pattern we call the interrupt buffer. And if you don't have that pattern implemented properly, you're gonna go half as fast. If you're lucky, you might go half as fast. Ula Ojiaku: And what do you say the Scrum Master has a part to play in making sure the interrupt buffer is there and it's enforced? Jeff Sutherland: The scrum master needs to set this all up. Fifth, in high performing teams, we see this pattern called swarming, where multiple people are working on a story together. That increases the process efficiency, which doubles the performance of the team. So, if people are specialists working independently, that team is going to be really slow. So I'm up to number five, there are six more things, but you probably want to go through them. It's very clear, what makes agile teams suck, we know exactly why. And it needs to be fixed. So, I appeal to anyone listening to this help fix bad agile, it's hurting us all. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you for sharing that. Would this be in any of any of your books or in any of your articles that you've written? Jeff Sutherland: Yeah, it's everywhere and (in) everything I've written, but the best summary, it's the red book Scrum … Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work and Half the Time And we've had people pick, pick this up. A CEO in Kenya came to New York to one of my courses, he said, ‘Jeff, I just read your book. And I'm CEO with three new energy startups in Kenya. And my teams implemented that, and they're going… they're doing three times the work and a third of the time. So, your book is too conservative.' He says to me, this guy, he only read the book, he had no training. So, this book is enough to really get off on the right foot. And if you're having problems, it's enough to fix things. In fact, recently before COVID when we could get everybody together, we had an Apple employee in the class and she said, Jeff, do you know why Apple always meet its states? I said, no, you know, Apple is really secretive. They don't tell anybody anything. She says ‘it's because they do Scrum by the book.' So, I said, ‘What book?' She says, ‘The Red Book - Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work and Half the Time - they do it exactly by the book.' So, again, my message to the Agilists out there: Apple is winning. They are the most valuable company in the world. And it's because they do Scrum exactly by that book. So, you probably should read it. Ula Ojiaku: Definitely. So going by the book, would you say there's any wriggle room for adapting to one's context, or is it about you know, going, ‘check- we've done page 123…' Jeff Sutherland: Well, the whole thing about adapting is fundamental to Scrum. So, one of the things I'm constantly doing in my talks, training, is I'm going back to before Scrum and reading a paper from the leading researchers on complex adaptive systems, in which they mathematically proved, you model things on the computer, that systems evolve more quickly, if they have more degrees of freedom, up until you hit a boundary where the system goes into a chaotic state. So, from the very beginning in Scrum, maximizing the freedom and the decision capability of the team has been fundamental. And we talked about this as self-organization. Now, unfortunately, that term has been so misused, misunderstood that we had to take self-organization out of the Scrum guide. And what we inserted was self-managing. And we put next to it goals, okay, the theme is self-managing to achieve a goal. And to make that happen, they need a commitment to do that. And so, this is one of the fundamental things for Agile teams that work that they have that self-managing commitment to achieve a goal. And the teams that are not working, they're fuzzy about that, right. So, we want the maximum degree of adaptation, the thing that they don't want to change is the basic structure that's in the red book, if they change that, it has the control mechanisms to allow the maximum degree of self-organization - not to go off the rails. Ula Ojiaku: Right. Jeff Sutherland: So, we see a lot of Agilists, ‘oh, you know, let's just tweak the framework this way or that way.' And then the self-organization takes a team off the rails, and then they fall into that 58% that can't deliver, they're late, they're over budget, the customers aren't happy. And so, this is the really one of the hardest things to communicate to people. There're certain things that you absolutely have to be disciplined about. You have to be more disciplined to get a great Agile team than in all ways of working. And that discipline is what allows the maximum degree of self-organization and self-determination, right? So, understanding those two things together, you know, it makes it makes people's brain explode, right? It's hard. Ula Ojiaku: But it works. Jeff Sutherland: But it works right.  Ula Ojiaku: You've already mentioned a lot of books in the course of this interview session, and these would be in the show notes. So, would there be anything any final word of advice you'd have for the leaders that would be listening to this podcast in terms of their transformation journey? Jeff Sutherland: So, one of the things we did to Scrum at Scale is that the difference between that and most of the other scaling frameworks is that it's all about the leadership. So, we need an operating leadership team, that is a Scrum team that needs a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, backlog. And its objective is to improve the Agile implementation of the organization. On the prioritization side, we need a leadership team that, led by a Chief Product Owner, that is prioritizing backlog across the organization. So, you know, I've had the Chief Product Owner of Hewlett Packard in my course, he had a $200 billion portfolio. He learned from that class. Says this class is pretty good.' He said, ‘In just one slide I figured out how to get $20 billion more a year with no additional resources'. Just by understanding how to work the framework right? At the $200 billion level. Ula Ojiaku: And you're talking about the Scrum at Scale course, right? Jeff Sutherland: No, this was a product owner course. Product Owner course. He came to it. We're now doing a Scrum at Scale… we're actually doing a Chief Product Owner course. So, a Product Owners at Scale course which it has been really well received by the leading Agile Practitioners. (They) really like that because they need to work more in the large than in the small often. Ula Ojiaku: Definitely. That means this available on the Scrum Inc site? Jeff Sutherland: Yes. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Jeff Sutherland: So, one of the things I would recommend I would really recommend is the Scrum Field Book. It's a bunch of case studies for organizations, large and small, that have tried to take the whole organization to Scrum. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Sutherland - it's been a great pleasure having you and hopefully we could have a you know, follow up conversation sometime. Jeff Sutherland: Yes. Thanks for inviting me and glad to do it again. Ula Ojiaku: That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com. Also share with friends and leave a review. This would help others find the show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com. Till next time, take care and God bless!    

Dr. Jeff Sutherland is the Founder and Chairman of Scrum Inc. He is credited with being one of the creators of Scrum, which is celebrating its 30 year anniversary in 2023, and is a framework for enabling business agility at scale across an entire organization. Sutherland's mission has always been to spread Scrum around the world to free people from what he calls “the incredible life-draining system they're working under.” His teachings consistently expose the archaic systems that hinder productivity, and he's at the forefront helping the world's biggest organizations make the transition to Agile. To further his efforts, Sutherland is also a co-creator of The Agile Education Program powered by Scrum Inc., a training suite providing the curriculum and educational standards that give individuals and organizations a clear path to implementing Scrum in a way that drives immediate business results. A graduate of West Point, Sutherland served as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War and later spent time conducting cancer research before immersing himself in the world of software development. With his expertise, Jeff has held the role of Chief Technology Officer at eleven different software companies, bringing a wealth of experience to each endeavor. In 1993, Jeff pioneered the concept of Scrum by launching the first Scrum team. While things have changed a lot since then (spoiler alert: those original month-long sprints were far too long), he has continued to play a pivotal role in expanding Scrum's ability to drive Agile transformation at organizations across industries including government, finance, healthcare, higher education, and telecom. Recognizing the transformative power of Scrum, Sutherland co-authored the bestselling book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, and later published A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game. Through his books and extensive knowledge sharing, he has become a respected figure in the Agile community. His passion for fostering energy, focus, clarity, and transparency in project planning and implementation has made scrum a highly sought-after approach for organizations seeking efficient and effective project management. We had a chance to sit down with Sutherland as he reflects on 30 years of Scrum, the new Scrum QuickStart offering and what the future holds for Scrum's biggest possible impact on the world.

BONUS: How I Planned My Wedding With Scrum, and Other Key Agile Adoption Lessons With Julien Déray Julien wrote the book titled "How I Planned My Wedding with Scrum" to apply his knowledge of Scrum to the process of wedding planning. Scrum provided him with a sense of assurance, clarity, and familiarity with the tools he knew best. By deepening his understanding and applying Scrum principles, Julien found that it helped him feel more in control and provided clarity throughout the planning process. Furthermore, working as a team with his parents and family members reinforced the collaborative nature of Scrum. Why Use Scrum for Wedding Planning?  One of the key questions is why Julien chose to use Scrum to organize a wedding—a big-bang event. However, Scrum's structured approach and iterative process lent themselves well to wedding planning. Julien found that giving a crash course on Scrum, defining roles and rules, writing user stories, and using personas to craft experiences allowed for effective planning and communication. Regular calls with the rest of the family and feedback loops enabled them to stay on track and adapt as needed. In the end, Scrum provided a sense of peace of mind and control over the process. The main takeaway was the sense of control and peace of mind that Scrum brought to the team. Key Messages  The book provides an accessible Scrum introduction for a broad audience, including those new to Scrum, and aims to convey the why of Scrum rather than focusing heavily on the how. Even for experienced practitioners, the book provides a fresh perspective on Scrum and agile methodologies. It emphasizes the usefulness and applicability of Scrum in various contexts, including wedding planning. Challenges in Leadership and Management  Julien emphasizes that as an IT community, agile methodologies like Scrum are already well-established. However, the challenge lies in bridging the gap to the rest of the company. Other parts of the organization may not be familiar with the tools and methods used in IT, creating a need for alignment and collaboration. Traditional management approaches, rooted in Taylorism, no longer work effectively in a fast-paced, agile environment. Key Messages for Managers and Scrum Masters  Managers and Scrum Masters are encouraged to trust themselves and leverage the tools they have at their disposal. Understanding the purpose behind their work and proposing ways to bring others along are crucial. Agile is not just a methodology but a holistic philosophy that can drive organizational transformation. During this episode, we refer to the following books: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland Turn The Ship Around! By David L. Marquet, a previous guest on the podcast Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World The Birth of a Chaordic Age" by Dee Hock. The Phoenix Project, by Kim et al. Julien's book is "How I Planned My Wedding with Scrum." And you can find the book on Amazon About Julien Deray Julien is a senior engineering manager at SwissBorg. His journey has moved him from coding to leading fast-paced engineering team. He has a strong focus an agile methods, to facilitate communication and work processes, and to allow people to work better without spending more energy. You can link with Julien Déray on LinkedIn.

This episode originally aired in July 2021.    -------------------------------------------   As many organizations are talking today about becoming “agile” it is important to know what it really means. Dr. Jeff Sutherland (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsutherland/) is the ideal person to discuss this. He is the chairman and founder of Scrum Inc., a signatory of the Agile manifesto, coauthor of the Scrum Guide and the creator Scrum@Scale. He is also the coauthor of the best selling book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Today we talk about the misconceptions of Agile, the origins of the Scrum framework, and how his military experience and his work doing scientific computer modeling influenced him. For more resources, sign up for the newsletter at https://www.hardcoresoftskillspodcast.com/  Connect with me via https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/  

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. At one point in his career, Fred was both the Scrum Master and manager for the teams he supported. As he reflected on the impact of the retrospectives he facilitated, he noticed that even though the retrospectives took place, the same things kept coming up at every retrospective. The retrospectives were helpful for the teams to “vent” their frustrations and talk about what was not working well, however, there was never time to discuss the improvement actions. This anti-pattern helped Fred realize that he needed to change the way he facilitated retrospective meetings, and he put in place a simple rule that ensured the retrospectives were impactful, not just helpful for the team! Featured Book of the Week: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland The book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland, was a critical book for Fred's career and personal development in his understanding and practice of Scrum and Agile. One of the key lessons Fred highlights from the book is the razor sharp focus on delivering something “immediately”, by the use of questions such as “what can we deliver right away?” Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM's that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome! About Fred Deichler Always leaning on the Scrum values and Agile principles (even before he knew about them), Fred has guided numerous teams through their Agile Journeys over his 20-year career in Technology leadership. Driven by a passion for continual improvement and finding a balance between people, process, and tools. And Fred knows his own journey is just as important. You can link with Fred Deichler on LinkedIn.

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Matthias shares the story of a team that was in trouble with their estimations. Matthias had just joined this team, and noticed that the team was not able to communicate the uncertainty of their estimates. On top of that, this team was working with a very demanding customer, who had pushed the team to “minimize” their estimates! As a Product Owner, Matthias had to help the team get back their confidence, and build trust between team and customer. Listen in to learn how Matthias (as a Product Owner) helped this team work better with this challenging client. Featured Book of the Week: Lean from the Trenches (Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban) by Kniberg Matthias recommends Lean from the Trenches (Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban) by Kniberg, and Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland. However, as he puts it, he's learned the most about the Product Owner role from interacting with his peers, and trying to foster a more collaborative environment. He describes empathy as an essential skill for Product Owners.  How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she's supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!   About Matthias Kostwein Matthias is a Project Manager, turned Programmer, turned PO, turned Client Service Director with a varied background in different industries from Mechanical Engineering to IT Agencies. Throughout all of his journey, Agile has been part of his work life, even before he knew what Scrum was. You can link with Matthias Kostwein on LinkedIn. 

This week's short solo show explores a potentially transformational strategy you can put to work in your practice with as little as five minutes a day.   IT genius Jeff Sutherland first explored the value of a short daily team meeting in his book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.   Prav's been a big fan since reading the book shortly after its publication in 2014 and has since made daily scrums (AKA huddles) a feature at his group of practices and marketing agency.    In this episode, Prav looks at the origin of scrum as a software development tool, discussing how it can be adapted to a dental setting to transform the working week and boost business growth.   Enjoy!   In This Episode 00.47 - The daily scrum - an intro 03.00 - Scrum in practice 07.52 - Scrum in dentistry 12.27 - How to scrum 26.14 - In summary   About Prav Solanki Prav Solanki is an entrepreneur and dental marketer who has purchased, developed and exited a successful group of clinics. He is the director of The Fresh dental marketing and growth agency and founder of Leadflo—an advanced lead management system for dental practices.  

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: So you want to be a charity entrepreneur. Read these first., published by Mathieu Putz on January 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. If you want to start a charity, you need to be learning constantly. You'll inevitably learn by doing, but it will save you a lot of heartache to also learn from others. If you're interested in potentially starting a charity or are already running one and want to continue improving your org, here's what we at Nonlinear think will be useful to read. We don't recommend reading these in order or start to finish. Skim them ruthlessly, jump around to the ones that seem relevant to you, and try to really engage with the ones that are genuinely useful to you. Blog posts Why founding charities is one of the highest impact things one can do Should I start a charity now or later? Great blog post about the benefits of starting something now vs later. How to increase your odds of starting a career in charity entrepreneurship. This post also touches on how to get a low-risk taste of startup life to see if you'll like it. TL;DR - do self-initiated projects with no oversight, ideally recruiting and leading a team of friends/volunteers to help. What traits make a great charity entrepreneur Which jobs will best prepare you to become a charity entrepreneur? Why top performers shouldn't go to university. There are better ways to signal competence Why EAs in particular are good people to start charities Top 13 Tools for NGO Founders. Want to particularly highlight Upwork where it's really easy to hire freelancers for innumerable small tasks that it's not worth hiring a full time person for. Startup Playbook by Sam Altman. Probably the most information dense piece of advice for potential founders. Just replace every mention of “business” with “charity” and “profit” with “impact” to get the most out of this. This is true for most forprofit startup material Paul Graham essays, notably What You'll Wish You'd Known How to Start a Startup Do Things that Don't Scale Charity Entrepreneurship's resource list. Lots of good stuff listed here. A Brief Overview of Recruitment and Retention Research by Animal Advocacy Careers. Blog post reviewing the evidence for different hiring and retention techniques, ordered by evidence base and effect size. I wish all research was done and presented this way. Charity Science's fundraising research. Fundraising is a keystone skill for charity entrepreneurship. Charity Science systematically researched all the major fundraising methods and compared how well they worked. I'd pair this with reading at least one book on fundraising. Fundraising for Dummies is good, though probably not the best. Takeaways from EAF's Hiring Round by Stefan Torges There Are No Walls. Short post about how to see how many options you truly have. Books How to Start a High-Impact Nonprofit by EA's very own Joey Savoie and Patrick Stadler. If you could only read one book, it'd be this one. Managing to Change the World. The best book on management Kat has ever read, and it just so happens to also focus on the particular issues charities face. Peter Wildeford wrote some good notes on it here. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This is a classic for a reason. How to Make a Minimum Loveable Product. Technically a blog post, but should be read after Lean Startup, so put it in this section. Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street (summary) Atomic Habits by James Clear. How to be productive as an individual. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. How to be productive as a team. 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss is one of the most instrumentally rational people that Kat has ever encountered. Take his lessons, mix in a little EA epistemology, and cross-apply them to EA. Makebook. Ridiculously practical book about ...

Bio Dr. Jeff Sutherland is the inventor and co-creator of Scrum, the most widely used Agile framework across the globe.  Originally used for software development, Jeff has also pioneered the application of the framework to multiple industries and disciplines. Today, Scrum is applied to solve complex projects in start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. Scrum companies consistently respond to market demand, to get results and drive performance at speeds they never thought possible. Jeff is committed to developing the Agile leadership practices that allow Scrum to scale across an enterprise.   Dr. Sutherland is the chairman and founder of Scrum Inc. He is a signatory of the Agile manifesto and coauthor of the Scrum Guide and the creator Scrum@Scale. Jeff continues to teach, create new curriculum in the Agile Education Program and share best practices with organizations around the globe. He is the founder of Scrum Inc. and coauthor of, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, that has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide.    Social Media:                 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffsutherland                 Twitter: @jeffsutherland Website: Scrum Inc https://scruminc.com               Books/ Articles: The Scrum Guide by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber http://www.scrumguides.org/index.html Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland The Scrum Fieldbook by JJ Sutherland Agile Competitors and Virtual Organisations by Steven Goldman, Roger Nagel and Kenneth Preiss https://www.amazon.co.uk/Agile-Competitors-Virtual-Organizations-Engineering/dp/0471286508 Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster Moving World by John P. Kotter Leading Change by John P. Kotter Process Dynamics, Modeling and Control by Babatunde A. Ogunnaike and Harmon W. Ray A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game by Jeff Sutherland, James Coplien, Mark den Hollander, et al    Interview Transcript Introduction Ula Ojiaku: Hello everyone, my guest today is Dr Jeff Sutherland. He is the inventor and co-creator of Scrum, the most widely used Agile Framework across the globe. Originally used for Software Development, Jeff has also pioneered the application of the framework to multiple industries and disciplines. Today, Scrum is applied to deliver complex projects in startups and Fortune 100 companies. Dr Jeff Sutherland is the Chairman and Founder of Scrum Inc. He is a signatory of the Agile Manifesto and co-author of the Scrum Guide and the creator of Scrum at Scale. Jeff continues to teach, create new curriculum in the Agile education programme and share best practices with organisations around the globe. He has authored and co-authored a number of books which include Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time – which has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide.   In this episode, Dr Sutherland shares the backstory of how he and Ken Schwaber developed the Scrum framework. I was pleasantly surprised and proud to learn that one of the inspirations behind the current Scrum framework we now have was the work of Prof Babatunde Ogunnike, given my Nigerian heritage. Dr Sutherland also talked about the importance of Agile Leadership and his current focus on helping organisations fix bad Scrum implementations.   I'm sure you'll uncover some useful nuggets in this episode. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dr Sutherland.    Ula Ojiaku: Thank you, Dr. Sutherland, for joining us on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here. Jeff Sutherland: Glad to be here. Looking forward to it. Ula Ojiaku: Fantastic. So could you tell us about yourself? Jeff Sutherland: Well, I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. And I always felt that I would go to West Point of the United States Military Academy, even at a very young age. And I finally made it there. I spent four years there. And I went on to a program where a certain number of cadets could join the Air Force. And I told the Air Force, if they made me a fighter pilot, I would move into the Air Force, which I did. I spent 11 years as a fighter pilot in the Air Force. And most of the operational aspects of Scrum actually come from that training. My last tour in the Air Force was actually at the US Air Force Academy, I was a professor of mathematics. And I had gone to Stanford University in preparation for that position. And I had worked closely with the, at the time he was Head of the Department of Psychiatry, became the Dean of Stanford who had studied under my father-in-law, he had become an MD under my father-in-law, who was a brilliant physician. And I was working on research papers with him, both at Stanford and at the Air Force Academy. And I asked him for guidance. And I said, I'm thinking about, given all the work we've done in the medical area. Starting in Stanford, I'm thinking maybe becoming a doctor - become an MD. And he strongly recommended against that he said, ‘you'll just go backwards in your career, what you need to do is you build on everything you've done so far. And what you have is your fighter pilot experience, your experience as a statistician, and a mathematician, you want to build on that.' So, I had already started into a doctoral program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, which was not far from the Air Force Academy. And so, I talked to my department Chairman there who offered me a position in the department running a large research grant, funded by the National Cancer Institute and so, I decided to exit the Airforce and join the medical school. While I was finishing up my doctoral degree. And as soon as my doctorate was finished, I became a professor of Radiology, preventive medicine and biometrics. I was a joint across multiple departments. And I was doing mathematical research on modeling, particularly the human cell on a supercomputer, (to) determine what caused cancer. And to do that required extensive mathematical research as well as the medical research. But at the end of the day, what we found was for any complex adaptive system, like a human cell, or a person or a team, they go through different states. And they're moved from one state to the next by some kind of intervention. And so, if you understand what causes those changes… turned out in the case of cancer, there were four different states that led to a tumor. And in every state, there were certain interventions, and if you knew what they were, you could prevent them and prevent cancer. Or you could even, to my surprise, take a cancer cell and make it go backward into a normal cell. So, this fundamental understanding is the theory behind Scrum. So, while I'm doing this all at the medical school, a large banking company came by and said, ‘you know, over the medical school, you guys have all the knowledge about the technologies; the new technology, we're using (for) banking, you're using for research.' And they said, ‘you guys have all the knowledge but we have all the money and they made me an offer to come join the bank' [Laughs].   Ula Ojiaku: [Laughs]You couldn't refuse Jeff Sutherland: Not just me, it was my family. So, I wind up as Vice President for Advanced Systems, which was effectively was the CTO for 150 banks that we were running across North America.   Each was, you know, a dozen, 50, 100 branches. And of course, we were mainly doing the software, installation and support to run the banking operation, which is largely computer stuff – (this) is what banks run off. And as we're building these systems with hundreds and hundreds of developers, one of the first things I noticed is that all the projects were late. And I look at what they're doing. And they're using this process where they spend, you know, six months defining requirements, and then they put all the requirements into a Gantt chart. And then they, they plan on taking six months to build something, but it's never done. Because as soon as they start testing that they find there's all kinds of things that are broken. So, virtually every single project of the bank is late. So, as a head of technology, one day I walked into the CEO's office and I said, ‘Ron,  have you noticed all your projects are late?' He said, ‘Yes'. He says, ‘Every morning at least five CIOs or CEOs of the banks, they call me up.' And he says, ‘they scream at me.' I said, ‘wow', I said, ‘You know, it's going to get worse, not better. Because these guys are using this, these Gantt Charts.' And I showed him one. And then being a mathematician, I mathematically proved that every project would be late at the bank. And he was stunned. And he said, ‘what should I do?' I said, ‘we need a completely different operating system in the bank.' This is back in 1983. ‘Let's take one business unit. Let's take the one that's losing the most money, okay, the worst business unit' Ula Ojiaku: They have nothing to lose then. Jeff Sutherland: And it was the automated teller division that was rolling out cash machines all over North America. It was a new technology and they had a ton of problems. So, I said, ‘let's take that unit and every one, sales, market, support, installation, we're going to split them down into small teams. And we're going to have Product Marketing come in on Monday with a backlog prioritized by business value. And at the end of the week, on Friday, we're going to deploy to 150 banks.' ‘And I'm going to train them how to land a project every week, just like I trained fighter pilots to land aircraft. I'm going to give them a burndown chart, we're going to throw away the Gantt Chart, I'm going to give them a burndown chart to show them how to land the project.' So, he said, ‘Well, that's gonna be a big headache.' I said, ‘look, the bank needs to be fixed.' He said, ‘Okay, you got it.' So, I took that unit. I told them, ‘I know it's gonna take several weeks,' today we call them sprints, ‘for you to be successful.' Because as new pilots, trained to land, these high-performance jets, they tend to come in high and then they have to come around and try to land again, they over and over, they practice until they can nail it. And it took them six weeks, six sprints to actually nail the end of the week (and) deploy (to) 150 banks. But within six months, it became… it went from the worst business unit in the bank to the most profitable business unit in the bank. And the senior management said, ‘you know, Jeff, here's another 20 million dollars to throw at whatever that thing you're doing [chuckles] it's the most profitable thing in the bank, we're gonna put more money in that [Laughs]. So that was the first prototype of what we call today Scrum at Scale. Now, I've been CTO of 11, or CTO or CEO of 11 different companies. And for the next 10 years, I prototyped that model and advanced technology teams until in 1993, at a company called Easel Corporation, we found that because of the tooling we were building and selling to customers, we needed to build the tool with what today we call Agile Practice. Ula Ojiaku: Yes Jeff Sutherland: And we need to train the customer to use the tool by having teams do an agile practice. So, in order to train our customers properly in 1993, we actually had to formalize what I've been prototyping for 10 years. And we wrote it down and at the time we were reading this paper, we're going through 1000 papers in the journals I, you know, I had done many new technology. And, in every one of them, you have to read everything that's ever been done so that you can go beyond. You can use everything that's been done, but then you go beyond, okay? Ula Ojiaku: Yeah Jeff Sutherland:  So, it's a tremendous amount of research to launch new technology. And at about the 300th paper in our file, it was a paper out of the Harvard Business Review, which really surprised me, by two Japanese Business School professors, Professors Takeuchi and Nonaka. And in there, they described the best teams in the world. They were lean hardware teams that reminded them of a game of rugby, they said, ‘we're going to call what they're doing Scrum Project Management.' So, I said to the team, ‘we need a name for this thing that we're going to train our customers in, and let's call it Scrum.' And off we went. So, for the next two years, we were actually using Scrum within Easel deploying products. But it was not public, to the general industry. And Easel got acquired by a larger company. And at that time, I felt that this needed to be rolled out into the industry because we had benchmarked it with the best tooling in the world from the leading productivity company, and showed that it was… that (it) went 10 times faster [chuckles]. The quality was 10 times better, which is what you need for a new technology innovation. And so, I felt it was ready to go to the industry as a whole. So, I called up an old friend, Ken Schwaber. And he was a CEO of a traditional Project Management software company, a waterfall (methodology). He sold these methodologies with 303 ring binders, a software package that would make Gantt Charts [chuckles]. So, I said, ‘Ken, I want you to come up and see the Scrum, because it actually works and that stuff you're selling doesn't work – it makes projects late.' And he agreed to come in, he actually came up, he met with me. He stayed for two weeks inside the company, working, observing the Scrum team. And at the end of those two weeks, he said, ‘Jeff, you're right. This really works - it's pretty much the way I run my company.' He said, ‘if I ran my company with a Gantt Chart, we would have been bankrupt a long time ago.' So, I said, ‘well, why don't you sell something to work that works instead of inflicting more damage on the industry?' So, he said so we said ‘okay, how (do) we do it?' I said, ‘it needs to be open source, it needs to be free.' Ken felt we needed to take the engineering practices, many of which appear today in extreme programming… Ula Ojiaku: Yes Jeff Sutherland: …and let Kent Beck (creator of eXtreme Programming, XP) run with them because Kent had been sending me emails, ‘Jeff, send me every...', he had been following the development of Scrum, ‘…send me everything on Scrum, I'm building a new process. I want to use anything that you've done before and not try to reinvent anything.' So, he (Ken Schwaber) said, ‘let Kent take the engineering practices, we'll focus on the team process itself.' And we agreed to write the first paper on this to present at a big conference later that year. And writing that paper was quite interesting. Ken visited DuPont Chemical Corporation, the leading Chemical Process Engineers there that they had hired out of academia to stop chemical plants from blowing up. And when Ken met with them, they said, describe what we were doing in the software domain. They said, ‘you know, well, that process that traditional project management is a Predictive Process Control System. We have that in the chemical industry.' ‘But it's only useful if the variation in the process running is less than 4%.' They said, ‘do you have less than 4% change in requirements while you're building software?' Ken says, ‘no, of course not! It's over 50%!' And they started laughing at him. They said, ‘your project's going to be exploding all over the place.' ‘Because every chemical plant that has blown up has been somebody applying a predictive control system to a system that has high variability. You need to completely retrain industry to use Empirical Process Control, which will stop your projects from blowing up. And they said, here it is, here's the book, they had the standard reference book for Chemical Process Engineering. And in there, there's a chapter on Empirical Process Control, which is based on transparency, inspection, and adapting to what's happening in real time. Okay, so those are the three pillars of Scrum that are today at the base of the Scrum guide. Ula Ojiaku: Do you still remember the title of the book that the chemical engineers recommended to Mr. Schwaber by any chance? Jeff Sutherland: Yeah, so I have a, when I do training, I have a slide that has a picture of the book (Process Dynamics, Modelling and Control). It's written by Ogunnaike and Ray. But that is the root of the change that's gone on in the industry. And so then from 1995, forward, Ken and I started working together, I was still CTO of companies. And I would get him to come in as a consultant and work with me. And we'd implement and enhance the Scrum implementations in company after company after company. Until 2001, of course, Scrum was expanding but Extreme Programming in 2001, was actually the most widely deployed. They were only two widely-deployed agile processes at the time of Scrum and Extreme Programming. Extreme Programming was the biggest. And so, the Agile Manifesto meeting was convened. And it had 17 people there, but three of them were Scrum guys - that had started up Scrum, implemented it in companies, four of them were the founders of Extreme Programming. And the other 10 were experts who have written books on adaptive software development or, you know, lightweight processes, so, industry experts. And we, we talked for a day and everybody explained what they were doing and there was a lot of arguments and debate. And at the end of the day, we agreed because of this book, Agile Competitors, a book about 100 hardware companies - lean hardware companies, that have taken Lean to the next level, by involving the customer in the creation of the product. And we said, ‘we think that we all need to run under one umbrella. And we should call that Agile.' Ula Ojiaku: So, did you actually use the word umbrella in your (statement)? Oh, okay. Jeff Sutherland: Often, people use that right? Ula Ojiaku: Yes, yes Jeff Sutherland: Because at the time, we had Agile and Extreme Programming, and now everybody's trying to come up with their own flavor, right?  All under the same umbrella of ‘Agile'. And that caused the both Scrum and Extreme Programming started to expand even more, and then other kinds of processes also. But Scrum rapidly began to take dominant market share, Scrum today is about 80% of what people call Agile. The reason being, number one, it was a technology that was invented and created to be 10 times better. So, it was a traditional new technology developed based on massive amounts of research. So, it worked. But number two, it also scaled it worked very well for many teams. I mean, there are many companies today like Amazon that have thousands of Scrum teams. And Extreme Programming was really more towards one team. And (reason number) three, you could distribute it across the world. So, some of the highest performing teams are actually dozens of teams or hundreds across multiple continents. And because of those three characteristics, it's (Scrum has) dominated the market. So that brings us to in 2006, I was asked by a Venture Capital firm to help them implement Scrum in their companies, they felt that Scrum was a strategic advantage for investment. And not only that, they figured out that it should be implemented everywhere they implemented it within the venture group, everybody doing Scrum. And their goal was to double their return on investment compared to any other venture capital firm. They pretty much have done that by using Scrum, but then they said, ‘Jeff, you know, we're hiring you as a consultant into our companies. And you're a CTO of a healthcare company right now. And we don't want to build a healthcare company, we want to build a Scrum company.' ‘So, why don't you create Scrum Inc. right here in the venture group? We'll support it, we'll do the administrative support. We'll write you a check - whatever you want.' So, I said, ‘well, I'm not going to take any money because I don't need it [chuckles]. I understand how that works. If the venture capital firm owns your company, then (in the) long term, you're essentially their slave for several years. So, I'm not taking any money. But I will create the company within the venture group. If you provide the administrative support, I'll give you 10% of the revenue and you can do all the finances and all that kind of stuff. So, that's the way Scrum Inc. was started to enable an investment firm to launch or support or invest in many dozens of Scrum companies. Ula Ojiaku: That's awesome Jeff Sutherland: And today, we're on the sixth round of investment at OpenView Venture Partners, which was the company the six round is 525 million. There's a spin out from OpenView that I'm working with, that has around this year, 25 million. And over the years, just co-investing with the venture group I have my own investment fund of 50 million. So, we have $570 million, right this year 2021 that we're putting into Scrum companies. Agile companies, preferably Scrum. Ula Ojiaku: Now when you say Scrum companies is it that they facilitate the (Scrum) training and offer consulting services in Scrum or is it that those companies operate and you know, do what they do by adopting Scrum processes? Jeff Sutherland: Today, Scrum Inc sometimes help some of those companies, but in general, those companies are independently implementing Scrum in their organizations.   Ula Ojiaku: Right Jeff Sutherland: And okay, some of them may come to Scrum training, maybe not. But since Scrum is so widely deployed in the industry, Scrum Inc, is only one of 1000 companies doing Scrum training and that sort of stuff. So, they have a wide variety, wide area of where they can get training and also many of the startups, they already know Scrum before they started the company. They are already Agile. So, what we're interested in is to find the company that understands Agile and has the right team players, particularly at the executive level, to actually execute on it. Ula Ojiaku: No matter what the product or services (are)… Jeff Sutherland: Products or services, a lot of them are software tooling companies, but some of them are way beyond that, right? So, turns out that during COVID… COVID was a watershed. The companies that were not agile, they either went bankrupt, or they were crippled. That meant all the Agile companies that could really do this, started grabbing all the market share. And so, many of our companies, their stock price was headed for the moon during COVID [laughs]. While the non-agile companies were flatlined, or are going out of business, and so the year of COVID was the best business year in the history of venture capital because of Agility. So, as a result, I'm spending half my time really working, investing in companies, and half of my time, working with Scrum (Inc.) and supporting them, helping them move forward. Ula Ojiaku: That's a very impressive resume and career story really Dr. Sutherland. I have a few questions: as you were speaking, you've called Scrum in this conversation, a process, a tooling, the technology. And you know, so for some hardcore Agilists, some people will say, you know, Agile is all about the mindset for you, what would you say that Scrum is it all of these things you've called it or would it be, you know, or it's something (else)...? Jeff Sutherland: So, certainly the (Agile) mindset is important. But from an investment point of view, if the organization can't deliver real value, quickly, agile is just a bunch of nonsense. And we have a huge amount of nonsense out there. In fact, the Standish group has been publishing for decades. 58% of Agile teams are late over budget with unhappy customers. So, when you get these hardcore Agilist, that are talking about mindset, you have to figure out ‘are they in the 42% that actually can do it or are they in the 58% that are crippled?' My major work with Scrum Inc. today is to try to get to fix the bad Scrum out there. That is the biggest problem in the Agile community. People picking up pieces of things, people picking up ideas, and then putting together and then it doesn't work (laugh). That is going to that's going to be really bad for agile in the future. If 58% of it continues not to work. So, what we found, I mean, it was really interesting. Several years ago, the senior executive (of) one of the biggest Japanese companies flew to Boston wanted meet with me. And he said to me, ‘the training is not working in Japan for Scrum.' He said, ‘I spent 10 years with Google, in Silicon Valley. So, I know what it looks like what actually works. And I can tell you, it's not working in Japan, because the training is… it's not the training of the Scrum that is high performing. And in fact, our company is 20% owned by Toyota, and we are going to be the trainers of Toyota. And we cannot deliver the training that's currently being given to Toyota, it will not work, it will not fly. And we want to create a company called Scrum Inc. Japan. And we're a multibillion-dollar company, we're ready to invest whatever it takes to make that happen.' To give them the kind of training that will produce the teams that Takeuchi and Nonaka were writing about in the first paper on Scrum. And as we work with them to figure out what needs to be in that training, we found that the Scrum Guide was only 25% of the training. Another 25% was basic Lean concepts and tooling, right? Because the original Scrum paper was all about Lean hardware companies. So Lean is fundamental to Scrum. If you don't understand it, you can't do it. And then third, there are certain patterns of performance that we've developed over the years, we spent 10 years writing a book on patterns - Scrum patterns. And there's about a dozen of those patterns that have to be implemented to get a high performing team. And finally, scaling to multiple teams. It turns out, right about this time I started working with the Japanese, I was at a conference with the Agile Leadership from Intel. And they told me that they'd introduced Scaling Frameworks into Intel division, some of which had more than 500 Scrum teams in the divisions and the Scaling Frameworks had slowed them down. And it made the senior executives furious and they threw them all out and they said, we did not want to hear the word Scrum at Intel anymore. But you guys need to go twice as fast as you're going now. So, they came to me, they said, ‘we're desperate. We have to go twice as fast. We can't even use the word “Scrum”. What should we do?' And they blamed me, they said, ‘Sutherland you're responsible [Laugh] you caused problem, you need to fix it.' So, I started writing down how to do what today we call Scrum at Scale. And everybody, you know, most of those people in the industry were implementing IT scaling frameworks. They were all upset. ‘Why are you writing down another framework?' Well, it's because those IT frameworks do not enable the organization to show Business Agility, and win in the market. And in the best companies in the world, they're being thrown out. So, I've had to write down how do you add, how do you go to hundreds and thousands of Scrum teams - and never slow down as you're adding more and more teams. You know, every team you add is as fast as the first team when you start. Yeah, that's what Scrum at Scale is all about. So, there's two primary things that I'm focused on today. One is to fix all this bad Scrum. Second is to fix the scaling problem. Because it turns out that if you look at the latest surveys from Forbes magazine, and the Scrum Alliance on successful Agile transformations - I learned recently, that almost every company in the world of any significance is going through an Agile transformation or continuing transformation they'd already started years ago. And 53% of them do not meet management expectations. And the MIT Sloan Business Review did an analysis of what happens if an agile transformation fails, and 67% of those companies go out of business. So, this is becoming really serious, right? To be successful today, if you're competing in any significant way, you have to be agile. And number two, if you try to be agile and fail, you have a 67% chance going out of business. And the failure rate is 53%. So, this is the problem that we're wrestling with. And half of that 53% failure is due to the bad Scrum we talked about, but the other half is due because of the leadership not being Agile. Ula Ojiaku: I was just going to say, as you said something about the leadership not being agile. In my experience, you know, as an agile coach in some organizations whilst the teams would embrace you know, Scrum and embrace Agility - the practices and the processes and everything. There's a limit to, you know, how much they can get done… Jeff Sutherland: Absolutely… Ula Ojiaku: …if the leadership are not on board. So… Jeff Sutherland: …you hit this glass ceiling. So, I've been, you know, giving presentations on Agile Transformations around the world. And I can remember multiple times I've had 300 people in the room, say, and I say okay, ‘How many of you are agile, in Agile transformations or continuing the ones you'd started?' Of course, everybody raises their hand. ‘How many of you have waterfall traditional management that expects you to deliver all the old (laugh) Gantt Chart reports that we always got, and don't understand what you're doing?' There's 300 people in the room and 297 people raised their hand. I said, ‘you need to give your leadership the book by Professor Kotter called Accelerate.' Professor Kotter is one of the leading change experts of the world. Ula Ojiaku: And he also, yeah, He also wrote ‘Leading Change' as well - the book, yes. Jeff Sutherland: And in that book, he says, if the leadership of the Agile part of the organization is traditional in their mindset and requirements, the Agile Transformation will eventually fail 100% of the time. Ula Ojiaku: Those are sobering statistics in terms of, you know, the failure rate and how much of you know the success hinges on business agility and the leadership being agile as well and taking the time to know and care what it means. Yeah. Jeff Sutherland: And what's happening is that the Agile Leadership today, if you look at some of the companies that have been most successful during COVID, one of them is John Deere Corporation, the biggest farm equipment manufacturer in the world, probably the oldest. Their stock price went up more than Amazon during COVID. And the board of directors gave their Agile Leadership, the Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, the highest award in the Corporation for producing that result. So that's another reason I'm trying to communicate to Agile people. The success and survival of your company depends on you. You think your management's going to save you but no, if they are old-style people, they are going to run that company out of business. And you need to either save it before it goes out of business or run to another company before bad things happen. Ula Ojiaku: It's impressive that, you know, John Deere being a farm equipment manufacturer… I think they were ahead of the curve you know, (compared to some of their contemporaries in that industry as well) and embraced agile ways of working. Do you know how their Agile Leadership were able to quantify their contributions to the company? Jeff Sutherland: John Deere started to get Agile more than 10 years ago. So, they've been at it a long time. But in recent years, they really started to build… build internally… Agile leadership, you know, based on my work and they started applying that across the company. I mean, the major focus has not been software actually – it's been in other parts of the company. What has to happen to run a company that's building tractors? [chuckles]. Well, there's all kinds of things that have to happen, you know - purchasing, there's legal [Laugh], there's acquiring all the pieces, it's putting them together at the assembly line, you know, software is a piece of it. You know, that's probably the easiest piece to fix with Agile, it's the rest of the company that's the challenge. They have started doing that really well which is reflected in their stock price. Ula Ojiaku: Amazing. So, you said something about you know, you're out to fix a couple of things, the problem with bad Scrum out there. And, you know, the problem with scaling agile. Jeff Sutherland: Right Ula Ojiaku: So, with respect to the first one, the point about bad Scrum, what in your experience would be the root cause of bad Scrum implementations in organizations? Jeff Sutherland: There're about 11 things, that if you fix them, the team will go twice as fast. And it's multiplicative. So, you know, we have extensive data on, you know, really big companies. What's the difference between the fastest team and the slowest teams? The fastest teams are 2000 times faster than the slowest teams. So why is that? Well, first, the team has to be small. The optimal team size is four or five people. If you have a 10-person team, that's going to take at least 50% longer to get anything done. If you go out, look at the team size, you'll see companies have even not only ten-people teams, they have 15 people in a team, 25 people in a team, okay? Those teams are never gonna meet Agile performance. Second, the backlog needs to be really ready in a sense of small, it's clearly understood, it's properly prioritized. So, you need somebody managing that backlog that can get it right, because we have extensive data for multiple case studies showing the team's production doubles immediately. As soon as you get that backlog right. So you go into many companies, you'll see, there's still arguing about what's the top priority, right? Or everything's top priority. That's just gonna create a massive mess. Third, teams are constantly interrupted. You know, the only teams I know that aren't interrupted are people… these teams and defense contractors working on top secret stuff. And they work in a locked room, [Laughs] the door, it says ‘no managers can enter', [Laugh] and they don't get interrupted. But for the rest of us, there's always somebody coming in wanting something else done. And there's a way to manage that using a pattern we call the interrupt buffer. And if you don't have that pattern implemented properly, you're gonna go half as fast. If you're lucky, you might go half as fast. Ula Ojiaku: And what do you say the Scrum Master has a part to play in making sure the interrupt buffer is there and it's enforced? Jeff Sutherland: The scrum master needs to set this all up. Fifth, in high performing teams, we see this pattern called swarming, where multiple people are working on a story together. That increases the process efficiency, which doubles the performance of the team. So, if people are specialists working independently, that team is going to be really slow. So I'm up to number five, there are six more things, but you probably want to go through them. It's very clear, what makes agile teams suck, we know exactly why. And it needs to be fixed. So, I appeal to anyone listening to this help [Laugh] fix bad agile, it's hurting us all. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you for sharing that. Would this be in any of any of your books or in any of your articles that you've written? Jeff Sutherland: Yeah, it's everywhere and (in) everything I've written, but the best summary, it's the red book Scrum … Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work and Half the Time And we've had people pick, pick this up. A CEO in Kenya came to New York to one of my courses, he said, ‘Jeff, I just read your book. And I'm CEO with three new energy startups in Kenya. And my teams implemented that, and they're going… they're doing three times the work and a third of the time. So, your book is too conservative.' He says to me, this guy, he only read the book, he had no training. So, this book is enough to really get off on the right foot. And if you're having problems, it's enough to fix things. In fact, recently before COVID when we could get everybody together, we had an Apple employee in the class and she said, Jeff, do you know why Apple always meet its states? I said, no, you know, Apple is really secretive. They don't tell anybody anything. She says ‘it's because they do Scrum by the book.' So, I said, ‘What book?' She says, ‘The Red Book - Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work and Half the Time - they do it exactly by the book.' So, again, my message to the Agilists out there: Apple is winning. They are the most valuable company in the world. And it's because they do Scrum exactly by that book. So, you probably should read it. Ula Ojiaku: Definitely. So going by the book, would you say there's any wriggle room for adapting to one's context, or is it about you know, going, ‘check- we've done page 123…' Jeff Sutherland: Well, the whole thing about adapting is fundamental to Scrum. So, one of the things I'm constantly doing in my talks, training, is I'm going back to before Scrum and reading a paper from the leading researchers on complex adaptive systems, in which they mathematically proved, you model things on the computer, that systems evolve more quickly, if they have more degrees of freedom, up until you hit a boundary where the system goes into a chaotic state. So, from the very beginning in Scrum, maximizing the freedom and the decision capability of the team has been fundamental. And we talked about this as self-organization. Now, unfortunately, that term has been so misused, misunderstood that we had to take self-organization out of the Scrum guide. And what we inserted was self-managing. And we put next to it goals, okay, the theme is self-managing to achieve a goal. And to make that happen, they need a commitment to do that. And so, this is one of the fundamental things for Agile teams that work that they have that self-managing commitment to achieve a goal. And the teams that are not working, they're fuzzy about that, right. So, we want the maximum degree of adaptation, the thing that they don't want to change is the basic structure that's in the red book, if they change that, it has the control mechanisms to allow the maximum degree of self-organization - not to go off the rails. Ula Ojiaku: Right. Jeff Sutherland: So, we see a lot of Agilists, ‘oh, you know, let's just tweak the framework this way or that way.' And then the self-organization takes a team off the rails, and then they fall into that 58% that can't deliver, they're late, they're over budget, the customers aren't happy. And so, this is the really one of the hardest things to communicate to people. There're certain things that you absolutely have to be disciplined about. You have to be more disciplined to get a great Agile team than in all ways of working. And that discipline is what allows the maximum degree of self-organization and self-determination, [Laugh] right? So, understanding those two things together, you know, it makes it makes people's brain explode, [Laugh] right? It's hard. Ula Ojiaku: But it works. Jeff Sutherland: But it works right. [Laugh] Ula Ojiaku: You've already mentioned a lot of books in the course of this interview session, and these would be in the show notes. So, would there be anything any final word of advice you'd have for the leaders that would be listening to this podcast in terms of their transformation journey? Jeff Sutherland: So, one of the things we did to Scrum at Scale is that the difference between that and most of the other scaling frameworks is that it's all about the leadership. So, we need an operating leadership team, that is a Scrum team that needs a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, backlog. And its objective is to improve the Agile implementation of the organization. On the prioritization side, we need a leadership team that, led by a Chief Product Owner, that is prioritizing backlog across the organization. So, you know, I've had the Chief Product Owner of Hewlett Packard in my course, he had a $200 billion portfolio. He learned from that class. Says this class is pretty good.' He said, ‘In just one slide I figured out how to get $20 billion more a year with no additional resources' [Laugh]. Just by understanding how to work the framework right? At the $200 billion level. Ula Ojiaku: And you're talking about the Scrum at Scale course, right? Jeff Sutherland: No, this was a product owner course. Product Owner course. He came to it. We're now doing a Scrum at Scale… we're actually doing a Chief Product Owner course. So, a Product Owners at Scale course which it has been really well received by the leading Agile Practitioners. (They) really like that because they need to work more in the large than in the small often. Ula Ojiaku: Definitely. That means this available on the Scrum Inc site? Jeff Sutherland: Yes. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Jeff Sutherland: So, one of the things I would recommend I would really recommend is the Scrum Field Book. It's a bunch of case studies for organizations, large and small, that have tried to take the whole organization to Scrum. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Sutherland - it's been a great pleasure having you and hopefully we could have a you know, follow up conversation sometime. Jeff Sutherland: Yes. Thanks for inviting me and glad to do it again. Ula Ojiaku: That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com. Also share with friends and leave a review. This would help others find the show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com. Till next time, take care and God bless!   PROMOTION: Sign up for a free month's trial with Amazon Music to get unlimited, ad-free access to 75 million songs, podcasts  in HD here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/music/unlimited?tag=agileinnovati-21 *  * By clicking "Sign up and pay," you agree to the Terms of Use and authorize Amazon to charge your default card, or another card £7.99 per month after your trial. Your subscription renews automatically until cancelled. Cancel renewal anytime by visiting Your Amazon Music Settings.

Diane H. Leonard, GPC, STSI | https://www.dhleonardconsulting.com/ (dhleonardconsulting.com) Diane is a Grant Professional Certified (GPC) and Approved Trainer of the Grant Professionals Association. Diane has recently become a Certified Virtual Presenter through https://www.espeakers.com/marketplace/speaker/profile/27305/diane-h-leonard-gpc-lst (espeakers). She is also a Scrum Trainer by Scrum Inc, Scrum Master by Scrum Inc, and Scrum Product Owner by Scrum Inc. credentialed by the Agile Education Program powered by Scrum Inc.™ Since 2006, Diane and her team have secured more than $86 million dollars in competitive grant awards for the clients of DH Leonard Consulting & Grant Writing Services. She is an active member of the Grant Professionals Association. She is a graduate of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a Bachelor's of Science in Industrial and Labor Relations.  When not working with her team on grant applications for clients, Diane can be found in the 1000 Islands, out for a run, or drinking a strong cup of coffee. https://resources.foundant.com/education-webinars-for-grantseekers/being-an-agile-leader-in-your-nonprofit-regardless-of-your-title (Being an Agile Leader webinar ) https://resources.foundant.com/education-webinars-for-grantseekers/you-are-not-alone-burnout-is-real-relevant-and-recoverable (Webinar on preventing burnout) https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Healthy-Nonprofit-Strategies-without/dp/1119251117 (Healthy Happy Nonprofits book) https://info.foundant.com/2021-10-08AgileinNonprofitsSummit_RegistrationLP.html (Upcoming Agile Summit) Agile Blogs from DH Leonard Consulting & Grant Writing Services DH Leonard's Agile in Nonprofits website https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-audiobook/dp/B00NHZ6PPE/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw7rWKBhAtEiwAJ3CWLIPVTwqaFkLUPFSwYZZ5G7LbCSnw0uu781ESZGXxm3iykxAXaNwjcBoCC1cQAvD_BwE&hvadid=241618947090&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9021324&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=18386138660889644940&hvtargid=kwd-333795142695&hydadcr=22597_10356339&keywords=scrum+the+art+of+doing+twice+the+work&qid=1632499702&sr=8-2 (Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time) Contact Info: Twitter: @innonprofits  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/agileinnonprofits/ (Agile in Nonprofits) Diane'st email: diane@dhleonardconsulting.com  Want to see additional resources? https://resources.foundant.com/ (Visit resources.foundant.com) https://www.foundant.com/events/nonprofits/ (Register for a webinar) and your question might be heard in a future episode! Brought to you by Foundant Technologies.

This episode is part 2 of my conversation with Michael Faggella-Luby. In the first half of the conversation, we discussed lessons learned in his educational journey, and paused on an extremely critical point: teachers do the very best they can and it's important to remember we work within a system of supports. The second half of our conversation highlights the value of community for teachers and students. We explore how Special Education law has a history in the civil rights movement and equity for all. We wrap up with an optimistic discussion about where the field of Special Education is now and how it can continue to improve. Here are some of the resources Dr. Faggella-Luby shared in this part of our conversation:Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff SutherlandWatership Down by Richard Adams

This week's interview was one I had wanted to do for a long time. I work as Product Owner working closely with software developers creating apps at a military organization. We use the Scrum framework, which is one of the multiple agile approaches focused in delivering solutions quickly to customers. The approach is not just about being technically savvy, but on making good use of those critical skills like teamwork, listening and management. As many organizations are talking today about becoming “agile” it is important to know what it really means. Dr. Jeff Sutherland (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsutherland/) is the ideal person to discuss this. He is the chairman and founder of Scrum Inc., a signatory of the Agile manifesto, coauthor of the Scrum Guide and the creator Scrum@Scale. He is also the coauthor of the best selling book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Today we talk about the misconceptions of Agile, the origins of the Scrum framework, ,and how his military experience and his work doing scientific computer modeling influenced him.

In this episode, Richard interviews Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of the Scrum, founder of Scrum Inc., inventor of Scrum@Scale, and a signatory of the Agile Manifesto. He is also the author of the international bestselling book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Jeff shares with us his personal experiences which made him one of the leaders of the IT industry and beyond. Read the full transcript of the episode at https://kasperowski.com/podcast-67-jeff-sutherland/.

  After 11 years in the military he became a doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Sutherland contributed to the creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Along with Ken Schwaber, he wrote and maintains The Scrum Guide, which contains the official definition of the framework.   Links https://twitter.com/jeffsutherland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Sutherland https://www.scruminc.com/dr-jeff-sutherland-bibliography/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsutherland/   Resources https://www.scruminc.com/ https://education.scruminc.com/ Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time The Scrum Fieldbook Extreme Programming Explained   "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

In this episode we dive into our book review on "Scrum - The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" written by Jeff Sutherland. This book, although I.T. centric, has concepts that can easily be applied to how you manage your work and your life. Come find out what we think about it.

In this week's episode It's not being selfish – it's being smart. This week Paul talks about the importance of making sure your business pays you, the owner, first. And how hiding away money could actually help you spend more in the right areas, such as on your marketing Also on this week's show, does your MSP do sporadic maketing, or does it have a marketing machine? If so, like all good machines, it should operate with a rhythm. Paul explains how to get your marketing machine oiled up and working like clockwork Plus, another expert from the world of productivity – check out how to get more done thanks to our expert from Todoist Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul mentioned the books Atomic Habits by James Clear and Profit First by Mike Michalowicz Find out more about Paul Green's MSP Marketing Edge Paul’s special guest was Brenna Loury from Todoist, talking about how to improve time management and productivity Many thanks to Martin Baulig from Cloud Console for recommending the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On February 23rd Paul will be joined by Jay McBain from Forrester Research, talking about what 2021 could have in store for your MSP Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Hello, and welcome to Order 66. Here’s what’s coming up in this week's show. Brenna Loury: By the end of the day, you're like, "Oh, I didn’t work on this huge task that I'm supposed to work on because I was focusing on all of these other small things that are competing for my attention." Paul Green: We&rsquo

«Всегда нужно держать баланс между адекватностью внедрения процесса и тем, что переходит в бюрократию. Процессы должны воспитывать и развивать паттерн, потому что любой процесс — это та штука, которая должна оптимизировать работу». «Когда мы говорим про артефакты: как люди ведут проекты, где они их хранят, где они их обсуждают, — это практически одна их самых важных, ключевых, базисных вещей, которая позволяет команде быстро бежать и расти». Собеседник: Тимур Гаврилов, CPO, AzurApps ФБ: fb.com/timur.gavrilov.9 Ведущий подкаста: Юра Агеев ФБ: fb.com/ageev.yuri Подписывайтесь на канал подкаста в Телеграме: t-do.ru/mspodcast О чем говорим: 1:03 — Тимур рассказывает о себе 1:57 — Какие качества и навыки помогут стать CPO 4:27 — С какими проблемами чаще всего сталкиваются небольшие продуктовые компании 7:45 — Без каких процессов компания работать не может 9:06 — Когда планирование не работает 13:58 — Как понять, хорошо ли функционируют процессы 15:13 — Что мешает ведению проектов и выполнению задач 18:49 — Почему полезно проводить ретроспективы 20:49 — О процессах разных уровней и их проблемах 23:51 — Как построить процессы и управление ими в продуктовой команде 27:11 — Как менеджеру продукта организовать эффективную работу с разработчиками 31:18 — Что поможет научиться внедрять и улучшать процессы 34:07 — С чего начать внедрение новых процессов 35:08 — Как определить эффективность процесса 37:46 — Зачем нужны правильно построенные процессы 39:23 — Об отличиях процессов в онлайн и офлайн-бизнесе 42:05 — О чем спросить менеджера продукта, чтобы оценить качество процессов компании 44:18 — Какие ошибки могут быть в работе с продуктом, кроме невыстроенных процессов 46:58 — Как боты помогают следить за метриками и процессами 49:02 — Что изучать, чтобы научиться работать с процессами В подкасте мы упоминаем: — Джона Дорра и его систему OKR: http://bit.ly/2YfF6l0 — 12 вопросов Джоэла Спольски, чтобы проанализировать работу в компании: http://bit.ly/3ol7ZHe — PMBoK, свод знаний по управлению проектами: https://bit.ly/2YlaVJo Подборка полезных материалов от Тимура Целеполагание (как правильно ставить цели и работать по OKR): — Книга Джона Дорра «Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs»: https://amzn.to/3tdFn6q — Книга Эндрю Гроува «High Output Management»: https://amzn.to/2M1Eltv Процессы (управление разработкой): — Книга от Project Management Institute «A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge»: https://amzn.to/3oqm6uH — Комплект книг «Руководство к своду знаний по управлению проектами. Руководство PMBOKR» и «AGILE. Практическое руководство»: http://bit.ly/3iWZCAC — Книга Хенрика Книберга «Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban»: http://amzn.to/3pldozf — Книга Джеффа Сазерленда «Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time»: https://amzn.to/2Yloto3

Dr. Jeff Sutherland invented Scrum to help people make better stuff faster and have a good time doing it. JJ Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc, the leading provider of Scrum training and consulting. He is the author of two of my favorite Scrum books, “The Scrum Fieldbook: A Masterclass on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future” and the red book, “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.”  JJ is a worldwide leader in Scrum. He shares how Scrum can be used across industries and has firsthand experience using the framework to help teams deliver faster, much faster.  Connect with JJ via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jj-sutherland-b1486b6/ Connect with Felipe via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/engineerfelipe  Twitter at https://twitter.com/felipe_engineer   Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thefelipeengineer     Universal Paperclips Game Links: Online https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/  iPhone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universal-paperclips/id1300634274 Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.everybodyhouse.paperclipsuniquetest   Today's episode is sponsored by the Lean Construction Institute (LCI). This non-profit organization operates as a catalyst to transform the industry through Lean project delivery using an operating system centered on a common language, fundamental principles, and basic practices. Learn more at https://www.leanconstruction.org   Today's episode is also sponsored by Construction Accelerator. Construction Accelerator is an online learning system for teams and individuals that offers short, in-depth videos on numerous Lean topics for Builders and Designers to discuss and implement, just like on t his podcast. This is tangible knowledge at your fingertips in the field, in the office, or at home. Support your lean Lean learning at your own pace, visit Try CA Now dot com. Learn more at http://trycanow.com/     –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– The EBFC Show Intro Music: California by MusicbyAden https://soundcloud.com/musicbyaden​  Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/al-california​ Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/oZ3vUFdPAjI​ ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

#5amMesterScrum Show #385 Live - 10 Million Views with our Coke and Mentos Experiment Sprints and Is Subtle Influence of the Boss Watching Fair in watching for Team Improvement?  - Today's topics:  (1) 10,000,000 views sharing Scrum and Agile even in the world of Coke and Mentos Experiments, and (2) Using metrics a a subtle way to get team to pay attention to improvement goal aka Scrum The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.. Please like and subscribe and share 5amMesterScrum.  Please send me your topics.   You are are doing Great Please Keep on Sharing. #5amMesterScrum #scrum #agile #business #scrummaster #agilecoach #coaching #philadelphia #philly #celebration #experiments #sprints #value #done #improvement #goals #metrics #information 5am Mester Scrum Show #385 went live on Youtube at 606am EST Tuesday 8/11/2020 .Happy Scrumming,Social Media:- search 5amMesterScrum or #5amMesterScrum and you should find us and if not please let us knowLinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok    Podcasts: (search 5amMesterScrum)   Spotify, Google Music Player, PodBean, iTunes, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Breaker

Happy Vs Flourishing episode 12 featuring Rian Doris talking about the science of flow states, coaching techniques for flow and peak performance that reach from embodiment practices, recovery to flow triggers and gratitude. 15 obstacles to achieving flow state 1. Mindset 2. Distraction 3. Burnout 4. Exhaustion 5. Sleep 6. Overwhelm 7. Clarity 8. Motivation 9. Passion, purpose, curiosity, mastery 10. Time - output Recommended book: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time - Jeff Sutherland Favourite quote: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: ""Control of consciousness determines quality of life" Links: https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/ https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/radio https://www.instagram.com/flowresearchcollective/ Ted-x Talk: "Why Hustle Doesn't Lead to Success"   Happy Vs Flourishing links: www.ExceedingExpectations.me Facebook Group Twitter LinkedIn YouTube How to leave a podcast review: https://tonywinyard.com/how-to-leave-a-podcast-review/ Full shownotes including transcription available at: https://tonywinyard.com/hvf012-rian-doris/

Scrum with distributed teams. Agile in a traditionally non-Agile environment. Project Management in the time of Agile: is it still relevant? These are the topics we cover in the third episode of our series from the 2020 UMD Project Management Symposium. Listen to highlights from the three presentations, along with follow-up interviews with the presenters. Listen, learn, and get a free PDU! PDU Information Use the following information in PMI’s CCRS system to register the PDUs for this podcast: PDU Category: Online or Digital Media Provider Number: 4634 PDU Claim Code: 4634ASFWPF Activity Number: PMPOV0079 PDUs for this episode: 1 About the Speakers   Christine Brennan Schmidt has worked at the American Chemical Society for approximately 27 years. She has managed education programs and two textbook projects. In 1999, she made the jump to technology. She has worked on technology-based projects and products in positions within IT and Membership divisions. She currently has a wide variety of functions, including project manager for various department-led initiatives, product owner for a social collaboration platform, consultant on various enterprise-wide projects, and staff liaison to a governance committee. JJ Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc., a consulting and training firm that uses Scrum to rapidly deliver results in companies across the globe. He is the author of The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future, and coauthor of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written with his father, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum. Richard Wyatt has worked across the globe in UK, US, Australia and Indonesia delivering projects of growing size and complexity. He recently spent nearly five years as Director of Strategic Programs at TIAA, a leading Financial Services provider. During his career he has observed project managers struggle, as the size of their projects increase, and has researched and articulated the skill set required to be successful.

How can YOU, an amazing nonprofit professional, regardless of your title, embrace the role you can play as a leader within your team? Listen to this episode to learn how. About the speaker: Diane H. Leonard, GPC is an experienced and respected grant professional who has provided grant development counsel to nonprofit organizations of varying size and scope for more than a decade. Clients she serves include health care providers, advocacy organizations, social services agencies, elementary and secondary schools, and municipal corporations. Books: https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Leadership-Toolkit-Learning-Self-Managing/dp/0135224969 (Agile Leadership Koolkit) https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Healthy-Nonprofit-Strategies-without/dp/1119251117/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3NUPCNKMN76VT&dchild=1&keywords=the+happy+healthy+nonprofit&qid=1598035155&s=books&sprefix=the+happy+healthy+non%2Cstripbooks%2C240&sr=1-1 (The Happy Healthy Nonprofit) https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-audiobook/dp/B00NHZ6PPE/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3ME942H4R1HU&dchild=1&keywords=scrum+the+art+of+doing+twice+the+work+in+half+the+time&qid=1598035207&s=books&sprefix=scrum+the+art+of+doing%2Cstripbooks%2C309&sr=1-2 (Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time) https://www.amazon.com/The-Fearless-Organization-audiobook/dp/B07Q33FMBY/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+fearless+organization&qid=1598035329&s=audible&sr=1-1 (The Fearless Organization) Other Resources: https://agilemanifesto.org/ (https://agilemanifesto.org/) https://funretro.io/ (https://funretro.io/) https://www.agileinnonprofits.com/ (https://www.agileinnonprofits.com/) https://www.dhleonardconsulting.com/ (https://www.dhleonardconsulting.com/) https://resources.foundant.com/ (resources.foundant.com) Want to see additional resources? https://resources.foundant.com/ (Visit resources.foundant.com) https://grantseekers.foundant.com/events/ (Register for a webinar) and your question might be heard in a future episode! Brought to you by Foundant Technologies.

In this episode, Allen joined Shahin to talk about what truly Agile is in today’s world of Software Development. Topics We conversed about and around the following topics: Agile or Not Agile is nothing more than Better Software Better What is Real Agile Thinking? Reasons to Avoid Agile Fake Agile, Dark Agile (Foe Agile) Trust is the heart of agile SAFE v.s. Scrum; Kanban Board Assumes Linear Process Agile in The Time of Corona Scrum’s Response to Corona Remote Working Went Bad – More Silos The Complexity Of Working From Home Work Is A Human Activity Challenges of Successful Agile Transformation in Large Organization (And Typically Failures) Experiments Failure in Big Organizations; PMO and Agile Failure Pattern ING Transformation Story (New Zealand) + Home Depot Dunbar Number Agile Architecture Designing Flexible (Agile) Code and Dependency (of code) with the Client; The Holub Principle Architecture Process Code Culture Connected for True Agile Mob Moves Forward Even If Individual Has To Drop Out And Come Back In Social Software Development & Mentorship People & Resources: We referred to and/or mentioned the following people and/or resources: Books Fixing Your Scrum – (Amazon US – Amazon CA) Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time – (Amazon US – Amazon CA) Holub on Patterns (Amazon US – Amazon CA) People: Ryan Ripley Jeff Sutherland Ken Schwaber The New New Product Simon Brown Gerry Weinberg For more details please visit http://podcast.leanonagile.com. Twitter: twitter.com/LeanOnAgileShow  LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/lean-on-agile

Q&A with JJ Sutherland, the CEO of Scrum Inc and author of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time and The Scrum Fieldbook. JJ answers some of our biggest questions and shares some Scrum insights. We hope you enjoy this as much as we did! ----Do you want to learn more about Scrum? Follow us!Twitter / Facebook: scrumsup | Instagram: twoscrumsupFind out more about Alley at https://alley.co

In this episode of the Hello Blink Show, Harris and Shawn share tips and techniques on staying focused and productive throughout the day. Working from home can offer a great deal of flexibility, but it comes with the added responsibility of managing your own time. Finding motivation can be a tough challenge when family, chores, and social media vie for your attention. Specifically, Harris discusses the importance of food and exercise over other time management techniques and Shawn weighs in regarding the necessity of rest. The two then give insights on various methods of managing a daily schedule and keeping to-do lists before concluding with some recommended reading material. One Powerful Quotation: * 26:46 - Harris: “You can use Pomodoro...and whatever other kind of system you want, if you’re not giving your body the nutrients that it needs,...I don’t really care about the system [that you use].” Key Topics: * 1:15 - Harris opens the show by talking about how he is helping his clients navigate the Coronavirus stimulus and loan programs as well as how he is working with the Make4Covid group in Colorado that is making personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. 3:20 - Shawn discusses his recent machine learning project and making his Arduino course free. 7:30 - Shawn talks about motivation to work while at an office versus at home. 10:06 - Harris and Shawn talk about the illusion of looking busy in an office environment. 12:44 - Shawn discusses the problem with distractions and his own personal experiences in understanding his own daily rhythm. 15:31 - Harris gives an account of how he handles motivation throughout the day. 17:47 - Shawn talks about the importance of choosing and structuring tasks to keep focus. 19:07 - Shawn and Harris discuss how nutrition, exercise, caffeine, and alcohol affect focus and motivation. They conclude that diet, exercise, and sleep is more important than any time management program. 28:56 - Shawn discusses supplementing vitamins for helping with focus. 34:01 - A discussion about preventative medicine ensues. 36:51 - Shawn asks Harris about his experience with a nutritionist and how it might be better than going to a doctor. 39:58 - Shawn talks about the importance of getting rest, not just getting enough sleep but also taking time to deliberately abstain from work. Know how your body works! 43:25 - Harris and Shawn discuss staying focused on a granular level: hour to hour. They share tips on various techniques ranging from calendar blocking, maintaining to-do lists, reminder apps, and personal Scrum. 51:56 - Shawn talks about utilizing ultradian rhythms to be more productive and stay focused throughout the workday. 53:23 - Harris and Shawn discuss the various merits and pitfalls of social media in their lines of work and how they affect productivity. 55:56 - Shawn introduces two competing schools of thought: should you use the morning to tackle easy tasks or hard projects first? List of Resources Make4Covid (https://make4covid.co/) Making It podcast (https://www.makingitpodcast.com/) Basecamp (https://basecamp.com/) Trello (https://trello.com/) Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland (https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X/) Michael Hyatt: Why You Should Never Start With Your Most Difficult Task (https://michaelhyatt.com/most-difficult-task/) Brian Tracy: Eat That Frog! (https://www.amazon.com/Eat-That-Frog-Great-Procrastinating/dp/162656941X) Buffer (https://buffer.com/) Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (https://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745/) Work Clean by Dan Charnas (https://www.amazon.com/Work-Clean-life-changing-mise-en-place-organize/dp/1623365929) The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/B007EJSMC8) Host Contact Information: shawnhymel.com (https://shawnhymel.com/) kennyconsultinggroup.com (http://kennyconsultinggroup.com) LinkedIn - Shawn Hymel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnhymel/) LinkedIn - Harris Kenny (https://www.linkedin.com/in/harriskenny/) Twitter - Shawn Hymel (https://www.twitter.com/ShawnHymel) Twitter - Harris Kenny (https://www.twitter.com/harriskenny) License Information: “Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

En este episodio encontrarás algunas de nuestras recomendaciones para hacer que esta excelente modalidad de trabajo sea una experiencia única y muy favorable para ti. Libro recomendado: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time por Jeff Sutherland

Marshall goes full on Walter Cronkite and does some investigative journalism, asking all about the inner workings of Proko. The system we use to prioritize tasks and stay organized, the importance of delegation - Walt Disney built an empire by being a diligent delegator. Stan describes the exercise that improved his line quality while he was a student at Watts Atelier! Call and Ask Your Art Questions: 1-858-609-9453 *Some show links contain affiliate links to amazon.com Dorian Iten - https://www.instagram.com/dorianvisuals/ Ivan Loginov - https://www.instagram.com/loginovart/ Aaron Westerberg - https://www.instagram.com/westerberg/ Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time - https://amzn.to/2pYMh39 Online Scrum resources - https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide & https://scrumguides.org/  Fresh movie - https://amzn.to/2WiKMZO How to Hold and Control Your Pencil - https://youtu.be/pMC0Cx3Uk84 Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur Guptill - https://amzn.to/2BQC8rX Jeff Watts - https://www.instagram.com/jeffreywattsart/ Jacob de Gheyn II - https://proko.com/draftsmen-media/Jacob-de-Gheyn-II-Art-S1E22.jpg Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) - https://proko.com/draftsmen-media/Guercino-Art-S1E22.jpg Albrecht Dürer - https://proko.com/draftsmen-media/Albrecht-Durer-Art-S1E22.jpg Meditation for Artists - The Automatic Drawing Technique - https://youtu.be/MJYGFwGhHnA Draw Using Reilly Rhythms - https://youtu.be/StRohW0Og3w Gesture Quicksketch with Live Model - Tim Gula Part 1 - https://youtu.be/SvB3bnj63oc How to Use YOUR Pencil for Dynamic Life Drawing - Tim Gula Part 2 - https://youtu.be/ZRnQcwKU9DE Learning Gesture with Tim Gula - Part 3 - https://youtu.be/ECpZcgR1bgY How to play Durak - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak Learn to Draw - www.proko.com Marshall Vandruff -www.marshallart.com Stan Prokopenko -instagram.com/stanprokopenko Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a podcast about results, getting things done. How to move past uncertainty and define the future.  In this episode I talk with J.J. Sutherland. He is the CEO of Scrum Inc and is also the co-author of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written with his father, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum. His newest book The Scrum Fieldbook, A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future, is the topic of this show. For those of you unfamiliar with the term Scrum, it's a framework originally used as a faster, more effective way to create software in the tech industry. The Scrum process is now being used successfully in general business practice all over the world in companies of all types, outside of pure tech. This chat is in part a discovery process as to why that is.  J.J. says Scrum is the art of changing the possible or what is possible. And I think after listening to this episode, you might join him in that belief.  Some great advice here on not only what Scrum really is or how it works but J.J offers some great insights on teamwork, why projects fail, how to use failure and fear as catalysts and how Scrum can be applied anywhere.  Be prepared to be motivated to get stuff done after listening.  Enjoy!  I blog about all episodes, for more info visit larryweeks.com

In this episode,JJ and I talk about his new book "The Scrum Field Book - A Masterclass on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results and defining the Future". JJ is also the co-author of the book "Scrum - The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" with his father Jeff Sutherland. JJ is an award-winning NPR correspondent with assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, during the Arab Spring and Japan during the Tsunami on 2011. He is also the CEO of Scrum Inc. If you like to hear him speak live, join the 10th Annual Agile Day in New York on NOV 14.

Joe Krebs speaks with JJ Sutherland about his new book "The Scrum Field Book - A Masterclass on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results and defining the Future". JJ is also the co-author of the book "Scrum - The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" with his father Jeff Sutherland. JJ is an award-winning NPR correspondent and producer with assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, during the Arab Spring and Japan during the Tsunami in 2011. He is also the CEO of Scrum Inc.

JJ Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc., a consulting and training firm that uses Scrum to rapidly deliver results in companies across the globe. He is the author of The Scrum Fieldbook: ​A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future​ and coauthor of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written with his father, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum. Previously, he was an award-winning Correspondent, Producer, and Baghdad Bureau Chief for NPR. He covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. He has won Dupont, Peabody, Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas awards for his work.

Scrum Inc, CEO, JJ Sutherland’s new book The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results and Defining the Future offers a compelling collection of stories breaking down what makes Scrum (and other forms of Agile) succeed or struggle in organizations. Drawing on his personal experience, as well as that of his colleagues at Scrum Inc., JJ offers a wide range of case studies on how individuals and organizations have been able to leverage agile practices to solve business problems and deliver value for their customers. In this interview JJ shares a few of those stories, makes the case for The Renaissance Enterprise, and explains why organizational refactoring is such a crucial part of Agile Transformation. One thing students request in every single class I teach is “More Real World Examples”. JJ”s new book offers exactly that. If you are familiar with Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, you’ll have an idea of what makes this book stand out. JJ is not only the son of Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, but he also worked as an award-winning news correspondent and producer at NPR before becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer. With a background that is deep in storytelling JJ has put together a collection of tales from the field that draw you in with the narrative while delivering tips you need to know on what it takes to make Scrum (and Agile) succeed (or fail) in your organization. The Scrum Fieldbook Amazon - https://amzn.to/2lILCRE Google http://bit.ly/2nfHcST Barnes and Noble http://bit.ly/2msNuyn Apple Books https://apple.co/2ngyXpw Contacting JJ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jj-sutherland-b1486b6/ Twitter https://twitter.com/jjsutherland Scrum Inc. https://www.scruminc.com

This episode is a series of mini reviews on my favorite product and UX books I’ve been reading lately. I talk about what value each of these books brought to me as a designer and why I highly recommend them. Here’s the full list of books and authors: (1) Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (2) Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland (3) Inspired by Marty Cagan (4) UX Lifecycle by Jeremy Baines and Clive Howard (5) The Longevity Economy by Joseph F Coughlin. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/joshuareach/support

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice The Work in Half The Time Book Review Scrum is a framework for software development and project management which focuses on the team working as a unit to reach a common goal. Today’s podcast is a Book of the Week episode. Host Michael Pinkowski, introduces us to the book, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice The Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. Here are some major key points on today’s episode: Scrum’s first concept - collaborate. The 3S words - Scrum master, Sprints and Stand Up. How Scrum relates to happiness. The questions to ask everyone at the end of each sprint. So jump aboard and learn how you too can use Scrum to improve productivity in your team. 01:15 (Michael Pinkowski introduces the Book of the Week, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice The Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland.) 04:34 (Scrum started when author Jeff Sutherland worked with the FBI on a project called Sentinel.) 24:37 (Time is no longer a linear arrow but a cycle.) 27:13 (Michael discusses some of the axioms in the book.) 40:24 (How to apply Scrum in your business.) Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time, money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 01:15 (Michael Pinkowski introduces the Book of the Week, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice The Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland.) Michael: Hello, my name is Michael Pinkowski and welcome to Awesomers.com. I am your sometimes guest host to give Steve a break from doing all these. And this is episode 82. We're going to do a book of the week, this week, if you are ready. And the book is Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice The Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, he is a co-creator of Scrum. Scrum is, this a development platform, it's a way of developing software, working on projects things like that, you probably heard about it, I'd heard about it. And number of years ago, I ran across this book and I just thought, man I really like these principles. I really want to know more about it and so I read it, I've listened to it again and again. And now in my current position of trying to get a company growing and do a lot of software development, it came back into my mind and I thought I'd share it with all of you. So let's get into a little bit, first of all they say in a small company that everyone is in sales and that's true, because you know, nothing happens until somebody makes a sale, but it's also true that everyone is a project manager, right? In a small company Steve and I used to say all the time, everybody's got three jobs you know, somebody would come in and say, “But, but, but, what about? I don't know how to do this.” We'd say, “Listen,

Today we have Steve Denner, the co-founder and COO of Adestra. Adestra is an email and marketing automation platform that helps companies take people through a customer journey to give them exactly what they want. They make a distinction that it is a software and a service. I see why because all of the customer videos about Adestra talk about their high touch approach with dedicated account managers. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [1:30] Jeremy introduces his guest, Steve Denner. [2:30] Steve talks about the internet landscape in 2004 and the opportunity he saw. [5:45] Where did the idea for Adestra come from? [9:30] Challenges faced along the way. [11:30] Popular features for Adestra starting out. [17:30] How Steve’s team serves their clients. [23:30] Incorporating customer feedback. [27:00] Why it’s important to hire the right people. What is Scrum Methodology? [30:00] Steve talks about developing an automation suite. [34:30] How are people using Steve’s heat mapping tool? [39:00] Steve talks about working with Incisive Media. [42:00] Who are the best clients to use Adestra? [44:00] How to connect with Adestra. [45:30] What does it take to attract talented team members? In this episode… What would an automation platform that has a heart look like? Seriously! Is it even possible? Doesn’t automation imply that it’s all about efficiency and results not about providing a human touch? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from business leader and entrepreneur, Steve Denner. In his conversation with Jeremy, Steve opens up about how Adestra got started, why he made the leap to start the company, challenges that he and his team have faced along the way, why they’ve chosen to incorporate customer feedback, who the best clients are to use Adestra’s services, how they are able to attract top-level talent, and so much more! You don’t want to miss a minute of this engaging episode featuring Steve! When was the last time you saw a great opportunity and seized upon it? How did it turn out? Are you glad you took action on what you saw? How would you respond if you saw a significant opportunity in the marketplace today, would you take the risk and go for it? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from innovator and entrepreneur, Steve Denner. Steve shares about what it was that he saw back in 2004 when he surveyed the internet landscape and decided to create what would become, Adestra. You don’t want to miss this great opportunity to learn from a key leader who was able to see what others couldn’t at a critical time. Make sure to check out this fascinating episode! How would you respond if you’ve been in an industry for years churning out high-quality results for your clients but still had to fight tooth and nail to convince new clients that you could handle their business? Would you throw your hands up in frustration or would you find a way to prove them wrong? On this episode of Inspired Insider, Steve Denner shares how he and his team used the challenging moments they faced as fuel to keep them motivated and pushing the envelope of excellence. While it wasn’t always easy, Steve and his team remained committed to making a name for themselves and serving their clients with dedication and professionalism. To hear more about Steve’s journey with Adestra and the challenges they faced along the way, make sure to listen to this informative episode! One of the best ways to gauge the quality of an organization is to look at the people they employ. How would your company rank in this regard? Do you have the best people in your field? What could you do to up your game and attract top talent to your organization? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from business leader Steve Denner. Steve is convinced that the quality of their team members at Adestra is what really sets them apart in their industry. Find out how Steve and his leadership find the right team members and create a culture of success by listening to this exciting episode, you don’t want to miss it! Did you know that listening to your customers and incorporating their feedback can help you build a rock-solid reputation in the marketplace? It’s true! According to Steve Denner, the way their team members treat their clients and listen to their concerns is one of their secret weapons. At Adestra, they take pride in being one of the top quality automation platforms in the marketplace today but they also hold in high regard their reputation for how they treat their clients. To hear more about their approach as an automation platform with a heart, make sure to listen to this powerful episode of Inspired Insider! Resources Mentioned on this episode https://www.adestra.com/ Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice The Work In Half The Time Sponsor for this episode The Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition – better known as IRCE – is your one-stop-shop for all of your e-retail needs. This conference and trade show offers you everything your business needs to stay ahead of your competition, in one simple location. IRCE is right around the corner in Chicago so go to www.irce.com to find out more. *************** Rise25 is where entrepreneurs of 6,7, and 8 figure businesses come together live and in person every few months to solve their biggest business challenges through this high-level Mastermind group. Each member leaves each week with lifelong friendships and actionable steps to take their business to the next level. Check out Rise25.com - a group run by myself and cofounder John Corcoran. Rise 25 is application only.

Thomas Cox is a lean leadership coach and practitioner who found himself really interested in blockchain. He has focused his efforts on the governance aspect of blockchain because of the influence it has on relationships, resources, and collaboration. He was a former governor candidate, and he has a unique view on leadership lean and blockchain. He brings experience in these three areas and he sees the intersection these components working together so that an organizational culture can be created and sustained. Where to find out more about Thomas Cox:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasbcox/ (LinkedIn ) https://twitter.com/tbcox (Twitter) Email https://tomonleadership.com/ (Tom on Leadership Podcast) Books Mentioned: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Practice-Learning-Organization/dp/0385517254 (The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization) https://www.amazon.com/Machine-That-Changed-World-5-Million-Dollar/dp/0892563508/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1526355179&sr=1-1 (The Machine That Changed the World) https://www.amazon.com/Road-Less-Traveled-Psychology-Anniversary/dp/B00007CI68/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526355297&sr=1-1&keywords=The+road+less+traveled (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Values, and Spiritual Growth) https://www.amazon.com/20-Solution-Redesign-Tomorrows-Organizations/dp/0471132780/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526355353&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=John+Cotter+Leader+and+Management (The 20% Solution: Using Rapid Redesign to Create Tomorrow's Organizations Today) https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles-Manufacturer/dp/0071392319/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526355439&sr=1-1&keywords=toyota+way (The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer) https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1526355759&sr=1-1 (Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time) https://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/1107569788/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=F38Z9N2FDP840T4APQSV (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action ) https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Virtue-Instincts-Evolution-Cooperation/dp/0140264450/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526358596&sr=1-1&keywords=the+origins+of+virtue+and+human (The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation) Blockchains Mentioned https://bitshares.org/ (https://bitshares.org/) https://steemit.com/ (https://steemit.com/) https://eos.io/ (https://eos.io/)

This week's book: Scrum The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time 2018 Technology Predictions: 1) An Uneasy Future for Politics and Technology 2) Cyber Security- Exposure and Adoption 3) Mobile Trumps TV in China 4) Translation Technology Takes Hold 5) Over and Out Email 6) International Labor- Arbitrage Flourishes 7) The Unlikely Comeback of the Sofware Suite 8) Industry 4.0 9) Boom and Bust of ICOs 10) Augmented Reality- Adapts for Early Adoption

James Wedmore is a video marketing strategy expert, author, coach, and podcaster who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs over the last 8 years learn how to leverage the power of video marketing and YouTube to grow their businesses through his online courses and programs. In 2016, he shifted his focus after discovering a massive gap in the online marketplace - the mindset of entrepreneurs - and launched his podcast and signature course. James joins me to share his entrepreneurial journey, discuss how your mind influences your business, and the importance of overcoming limited beliefs and mindset blocks to achieve your goals and become a successful entrepreneur. We discuss how core beliefs play a role in your success in life and business and why it's so important to step out of your comfort zone to reach your goals.   “You change your thinking - you change your world.” - James Wedmore   In This Episode of The Sigrun Show: How James transitioned from being a video marketing expert to a mindset mastering coach His philosophy on “stacking the deck” to improve your mindset Strategies to improve your mindset The importance of observing yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, and your intuition His definition of the term “hustle” and why people often find comfort in working hard and hustling His 95/5 principle and how it will impact your business and life What it truly takes to be successful   Resources Mentioned in This Episode:   Jeff Sutherland's book: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time     Key Takeaways: The secret to success isn't in the strategy - it's in your mindset. Become your own student and, simultaneously, your own teacher. Everything we need lies within us. Observe yourself and your feelings. Believe in yourself. You are worthy. Intention and mindset is everything. You choose your perspective and your intention. Connect with James Wedmore:   Mind Your Business Podcast   Please share, subscribe and review on iTunes Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Sigrun Show. If you enjoyed this episode please share, subscribe and review on iTunes or Google Play Music so more people can enjoy the show. Don't forget to follow and connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!   Get Your Free Training Through my own entrepreneurial journey and by training thousands of online entrepreneurs I've identified 7 STAGES of a Profitable Online Business. Get free access to the 7 Stages training videos and take your online business to the next stage.

Market volatility leads many investors to make a big mistake when planning their finances. Learn how to avoid the most common investing mistakes. How can you make time work to your advantage, both in your investment portfolio and life in general? In today’s interview, Jeff Sutherland, former fighter pilot and author of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, shares his unique model for achieving goals quickly and efficiently. Apply this model to personal finance, and get tips on how to develop more self-discipline in your financial habits. Follow Jeff and his work at www.scruminc.com. Download the first chapter of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time onto your e-reader for free here.

Total Duration 41:32 Download episode 152 Too Good to Be True? In this episode, I welcome Scrum inventor and co-creator Jeff Sutherland. He's the author of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Does getting twice the work done in half the time sound like a promise that's too good to be true? Well, read Jeff's book and you'll find this isn't just conjecture. There's evidence that Scrum could radically help you and your team more reliably deliver your projects. Learn more about Jeff and his company at http://ScrumInc.com. Also, you can find the Scrum Guides at http://ScrumGuides.org. Join me for a Free Webinar Want to learn more about how to deliver successfully when you're faced with uncertainty? I'm leading a free webinar for listeners of The People and Projects Podcast. Join me on Thursday, 4 August, 2016 at 11:00am Central (GMT-5). Register for free at https://PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com/Webinar. Thank you for joining me for this episode of The People and Projects Podcast! Have a great week! {youtube}s4thQcgLCqk{/youtube} DEADLY ROULETTE by Kevin Macleod Licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 License. DISTRICT FOUR by Kevin Macleod Licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 License. TOO GOOD IS TRUE by Rascal Flatts available on Amazon at http://amzn.to/2acevzE

In this episode of the Better Than Success Podcast, your host Nikki Purvy reveals step-by-step her time management technique that allows her to complete more in a day than others complete in a week.  We all know that time management is key to success and business development. This 9-step process is easy to follow and start with laying a solid foundation that starts with mindset.  There is also a free download that will help listeners to adopt this technique.   Last week on episode 4 of the “Better than Success” Podcast we talked about the 3 Phases of work/life balance for new entrepreneurs. We talked about the ‘Tantrum Phase’, ‘The Superman Phase’ and the ‘Work Smarter not Harder Phase’. In the ‘Work Smarter not Harder Phase’, we learn that time is the most valuable resource. This is why it is important for us to learn to maximix our time if we must work smarter Here I will lay out my 9 step process to maximize my time and get 75% more done in a day. Steps 1-3 are foundational and very important. Step 1. Develop A Time Control Mindset. This is the most important step in this whole process. You have to develop a Time Control Mindset. I’m going to note a couple of facts that will help you develop a Time Control Mindset “You have the same amount of hours in a day as Beyonce” "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" – Parkinson’s Law “You are AlWays the boss of your time” –Nikki Purvy Step 2. Learn to Focus. Most people cannot focus. This is not based on empirical evidence but I would guess that 80% of people don’t now how to focus on a single task for an hours up to 40 hours let alone one that takes 1 hour. I learned the importance of concentration from the book the THE POWER OF CONCENTRATION. Theron Q. Dumont or William Walker Atkinson. The author is noted as both men. Here are some tasks that will help you focus working out without stoping to talk to your friends Reading Playing an instrument or anything that requires you to use your hands   Here are some focus killers TV Social Media Too much work-time banter  Step 3. Time yourself Write out your tasks to be completed over the next day/hour/week in haphazard increments before you attack them. Time your self on each individual task. How long does it take to complete each task uninterrupted? This is very important. This concept came from the book ‘Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time’ by Jeff Sutherland. I didn’t read all of it but I did uncover the part where the author talks about learning how long t takes to do certain tasks before you lock down a project due date The concept here is to get an accurate time frame of how long it takes to complete different tasks uninterrupted when you’re focused. Record these times, take a mental note or whatever. This may take a week or a month for you to get a proper account for how long it takes to complete tasks. Steps 4-9 I have a worksheet for you to download at betterthanSuccess.com/5 Step 4. Record Your Tasks as They Come to You Record all your tasks as they come to your head. Write down all your tasks to be completed as you go along in life. Take notes in your phone, write on scraps of paper, or take notes on your computer. You will get ideas from everywhere. Write them down anywhere but be sure that you can find them come Monday morning. And at the top of every other working day BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING. BEFORE YOU HAVE YOUR COFFEE. Do steps 5 and 6. Step 5. Create Your Master Task List Make a list of all your tasks that you recorded in your various places. Take them all and put them in one place, for the week, ON the COMPUTER. This is called the master task list Step 6. Schedule Out Your Day Schedule out your day. Just today. Schedule out 15 min, 30 min, 1 –2 hour blocks of time to complete tasks throughout your day and start inserting them in these blocks according to priority and how long it takes you to do a task uninterrupted, because remember you timed yourself. This is called the daily schedule Add in your coffee break and your lunch break. And your Facebook break if you need one. Schedule these out. Schedule out time to BS with your coworkers. For real, factor that in. Step 7. Define the End of the Day Give yourself a definitive time to end work for the day, no matter what. This is what gives you the work/life balance. Note: As you go through your day sticking as close to your schedule as possible make note of the following: Remember you are only doing today so not everything from the week’s list will get in here. Its not supposed to. What this does is it allows you to race against the clock for completing individual tasks and gives you a deadline for each. So its like you are always working in the last minute without the pressure. It also assures you that you are actually working as efficiently as you can. As you go through the day completing tasks use the strike out to cross them out both on the schedule and the large task list As new things come up through out the day that does not need your immediate attention, add them to the master task list. Step 8. Account for the things you completed At the end of the day account for the things you completed as well as the things you did not. Sometimes things come up or new more urgent tasks get thrown in the day so tasks take a little longer. So you may not complete everything but that’s ok. You did as much as you possibly could. And if that is true then it’s a lot. You are human, so that means that you are powerful by nature. As long as you are at your best then that means you did a lot! Step 9. Start your new day Before you do anything as soon as you sit at your desk. Take the things from the master task list that did not get crossed off and the things that did not get completed and remember the new tasks that came up yesterday that didn’t require your immediate attention they should be here too. Copy and paste them all down to anew master task list for that day and repeat steps 6-8. This is why you do this on a computer. 

Sponsored by:Audible.com, the best place on the Internet for audiobooks. Listeners of British Android Havoc can get a free audiobook download and 30 day free trial! Over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player. On this episode, Teppo and Breki sit down to have a chat about the big questions; the end of privacy, the migration crisis in Europe, the uneven distribution of the future and everything else they think of along the way. Show notes and links: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time: Jeff Sutherland: 9780385346450: Amazon.com: Books (amazon.com). Failing is learning (imgur.com). Mic Technique (youtube.com). Overview effect (en.wikipedia.org). Iceland, U.S. Facebook Groups See Outpouring of Humanity for Syrian Refugees (newsweek.com). Pope tells Europe's churches to host refugees (edition.cnn.com). This post has no title. (dailymail.co.uk). This post has no title. (makewealthhistory.org). BBC Radio 4 (bbc.co.uk).

A book summary of Scrum -The Art Of Doing Twice The Work In Half The Time

Our annual list of the top 10 books we read this last year--fiction and non-fiction.Listen now: (download)Russ' top non-fiction:Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (A Book Review)To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological SolutionismThe Innovators (Book Review Episode)Dataclysm (Episode: The Intersection of Product Design and Big Data with Natasha Irizarry)The Idea FactoryBett's top non-fiction:The Phoenix ProjectScrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the TimeThe Glass CageTo Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological SolutionismSeneca: Letters from a StoicRuss' top fictionThe Martian: A NovelDaemonCat's Cradle: A NovelWhite NoiseThe CircleBett's top fictionThe Martian: A NovelThe CircleHyperionAndroid's DreamDaemon

Before we begin... have you gone to iTunes or Stitcher to give us a review? It takes so little time and would sure help us a lot. Thanks! New: Agile Coach Camp US West, April 10-12, 2015 - AgileGathering.com for more info Visit our brand new forums on the AgileCoffee website For this episode, Vic and Jon are joined by Larry Lawhead (lawhead5@hotmail.com), Dale Ellis (@thedigitaldale) and Brett Palmer (@brett_palmer) for peaceful morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Why is IT Ops the next big thing? We discussed Jez Humble and David Farley's Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation Coach Crisis Corner - Jon wants to build a databank of shared coaching problems (not necessarily the "solutions"). To help him, we've started a Coach Crisis topic in our new forums area. Stop by to submit your problem scenario. Larry's promise to his CEO - Jeff Sutherland's new book (Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time) has inspired Larry promise his CEO that as sales goes up, the cost of production will go down because the team will be better at what they do. Kanban Standup meeting formats - What techniques (beyond "walking the board") can be used for kanban teams? Reach out to Vic (@AgileCoffee) and Jon (@WaterScrumBan) on Twitter –  and use the hashtags #askAgileCoffee or #tellAgileCoffee to interact with us on an upcoming episode.

I am pleased to share an interview with Agile pioneer, Jeff Sutherland.  Jeff is a founding father of Scrum and Agile.  He is a noted author and speaker.  Jeff provides insight to many of the largest organizations in the world.  In this episode, Jeff addresses some of the tough issues facing today's organizations.  Please take a moment to listen using the link below or subscribe to the podcast using this link.Please visit Jeff's website: scruminc.com to learn more and check out available courses. During the episode, Jeff mentioned several great books which are linked below for your convenience.  Please take a moment to pick up a few copies for your Agile teams.Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the TimeAll Things Agile - Episode 006 - Jeff Sutherland InterviewTranscript:Welcome to the All Things Agile Podcast – your destination for tips and interviews with the leaders in the world of Agile. Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and please check out our sponsor: TeamXcelerator.com. And now, here’s your host: Ronnie Andrews Jr.Ronnie: Hello everyone and welcome to the All Things Agile Podcast. I’m very excited to announce that today’s guest is Jeff Sutherland. He’s a true legend in the world of Agile, especially Scrum. He’s a founding father of Scrum and also an original participant in the Agile Manifesto. I’m very excited to have him on today’s show and I’m hoping that he can shed some insight into how implement Agile teams in larger organizations. So let’s go ahead and get started. First off, thank you Jeff for joining us today! Regarding my first question, I’d like to know what is your input or advice on how to implement Agile successfully in today’s global workforce where we often have teams that are spread across the globe: India, China, etc. How can we implement Agile successfully even if our teams are globally distributed?Jeff: Well, first of all, Scrum simplifies their already complex Waterfall implementations. So Scrum is easier to implement globally than traditional approaches. I’ve worked with many skilled firms over many years – the first one was actually IDX, now GE Healthcare, which was a competitor to McKesson and in fact, the head of marketing – Pam, at IDX who worked with me, implementing Agile there, went on to become the CEO of McKesson; she might still be there, I don’t know, I haven’t checked recently. But she was probably there when you were doing your Agile transformation.But IDX, at the time, had 8 business units. Each business unit had a minimum of 3 products. Many of them were acquired technologies, acquired companies, mainly in the United States, but some teams that I’ve worked with were in Europe; but scattered all over the place. So we scaled Scrum in a big way. One of the best teams was actually in 3 locations across the continent. So I’ve written about at least a half a dozen papers on good distributed implementations of Scrum, and Scrum is the only way of doing software that allows you to actually scale up without losing productivity per developer. As soon as you start to scale Waterfall, the productivity per developer goes down. It starts to drop radically once you get more than 6 people, which is why we keep Scrum teams small. But by keeping Scrum teams small and then using the scalability mechanism that we do, we actually have several case studies now which are the only ones every published showing that you can scale globally and when you scale, you can get linear scalability by adding teams.Of course, you have to do Scrum well. Now, one of the problems with any kind of distribution – Microsoft did a study on this a few years ago in a process group – and they found that in every case, in 10 years of doing Microsoft distributed development, in every case, it delayed the project, it increased the project risk and it increased the dysfunction on the teams. And so, any time you distribute, those are the 3 things that you have to deal with. And as I’ve said, Scrum can effectively deal with all of them, but only if you run a very good Scrum locally. Then you can distribute it. If you distribute a bad Scrum, then you magnify the dysfunction when you distribute. But that’s also true with Waterfall. So, in the worst case, Scrum is better than Waterfall.Ronnie: Okay – and maybe just a follow-up question to that: In your opinion, when an organization is looking to adopt Scrum and globally distribute, have you found that it’s easier to sort of treat the teams all as equals, if you will? Each one’s equally able to grab work from a bigger picture from the product backlog, or do you think that it’s easier to delegate certain either component areas or certain pieces of functionality to particular teams; or do you think that creates too much of a siloed pigeonhole?Jeff: You always want to maximize the feature teams. You always want to have cross-functional teams and have every capability on the team that’s needed to get to a ‘done’ state. One of the most interesting models today in scaling is Spotify because they elegantly did what I try to do at GE Healthcare. And what they’ve done is they have almost all features-driven teams. They do have some component teams, but almost all features-driven teams and all features-driven teams have a visible piece of the Spotify user interface. And every team can upgrade their piece of the product, every sprint, without disrupting any other piece of the product. And so, by making things visible for every team, and really managing the architecture and the dependencies properly, it gives them a very powerful way to implement a really cool product. And they really have to be fast and they really have to be Agile because their competitors are Amazon, Google and Apple. And any one of them will crush them if they don’t run fast enough. Google, Apple and Amazon are like a big tsunami, all coming at them at once and they have to run fast enough so that the wave doesn’t crash on them. Basically, they use Agile globally to do it. So I’d recommend that your people really study the way Spotify has done this.Ronnie: Excellent. If we look at that, it does make a lot of sense. I guess the next question I have is in relation to more of the program or release level type planning and the question is really regarding: when you have teams kind of more in the trenches that are in the process of adopting Agile, however you may still have parts that work large organizations at the program level or they’re trying to work through what’s going to be in a particular release and they’re still in Waterfall mode. Do you have any advice for organizations that – the trenches may be adopting Agile, but maybe at the top level, they’re still kind of left in Waterfall?Jeff: Well, basically that’s the way Scrum always started. We started in the middle of a big Waterfall implementation. So it’s not only common, it’s the usually problem when companies are starting off. And what we find, if we look at the success rate of traditional projects vs. Agile projects, even though there’s a lot of bad Agile out there, we publish data this Danish group gave up in our book on software in 30 days last year and the data showed clearly that about 10 years’ worth of Agile vs. traditional projects and over 50,000 projects showed that the success rate for traditional projects was 14%. 86% were either late, over budget, with unhappy customers or complete failures, nothing ever delivered. Whereas on the Agile side, and this is global data, worldwide averages, the success rate for the Agile projects was 42%. About 3 times the success rate of traditional projects. And many, of course, of these Agile projects are embedded within Waterfall. So what that means is that when you’re doing Scrum inside a company that’s doing Waterfall, you’re going to be 3 times as effective at delivering your piece at the right time and 86% of the time, the Waterfall part of the company is going to be late.So that means that every Scrum team working inside that environment needs to get a very clear commitment from Waterfall on dates and they have project managers that are supposed to do that. In fact, that’s the big role of the project manager that’s left since Scrum doesn’t need them. So the Waterfall project managers have to commit to a date; the Scrum teams with their product owner will commit to the date and most of the times, the Scrum teams will hit it and then traditional implementations will fail. So the Scrum teams always have to have a Plan B so they need to clearly articulate to the management that when the Waterfall teams have missed their date and that they’re going on to Plan B and they should be called when the Waterfall team fixes their problems. One of the things that we sometimes see is that when the Waterfall teams are late, which they mostly are, then they say ‘Well, the Scrum teams – you guys are faster so we’ll just put you on the Waterfall teams’ which is a really bad idea, because it just slows the Scrum guys down to Waterfall speed. A better idea is for the Scrum guys to say ‘Look, we’re faster than you are – give us functionality, we will Scrum it – we may need some of your people to do that, but we can produce it much faster’. If you do that, Scrum will gradually grow in the organization and start to drain the swamp of failed Waterfall projects.Ronnie: Okay, excellent. I guess, my next question would be again in relation to large organizations, is on the subject of documentation. Obviously one of the challenges that a large organization gets is bureaucracy. That there are typically already in place a lot of gatekeeping documentation and they often times have so many different departments and one department hands off another’s keys to another – and in your experience, when implementing Agile or in particular Scrum at a large organization, what advice do you have on the subject of documentation? Ensuring that you have enough, but at the same time, that you’re still able to move quickly? Jeff: Okay, when Scrum launches just enough documentation and every time I ask anyone: do you have just enough documentation? They say: No! And I say: Well, take a look at what you got and get just enough. When I’ve actually looked with them, we find that about 68% of their documentation is totally useless and they’re actually missing a little bit – about 10%. That’s what we seen at some big companies. And companies that are doing medical devices that have to be FDA compliant, FDA certified we find that – one of my partners recently went into a German medical device company, they had 12,000 pages of documentation for an implant medical device. So he actually took that documentation to the FDA and said: Is this just enough? And the FDA said: Are you kidding? We won’t even read 12,000 pages. What are those people thinking?So he worked with the FDA and after 6 months, he got it down to 800 pages. So this is what we typically see on these high documentation traceability projects. Companies are generating 95% of what they’re generating is totally useless. The FDA doesn’t want it. And when you get it down to just enough documentation, only 5% is needed. So what Scrum will do in any company is ask the question: Do you have just enough documentation? If the answer is no, then they’ll look at what is just enough and when they determine that, they’ll make that really clear to the management and the rest of the company.If the management insists on producing 95% junk as in the case of the FDA compliant people, then nobody can help them. They’re just going to waste a lot of money. But what Scrum will make it clear is what is that’s just enough, what do we really need and we’ll get that on the table.Ronnie: Okay, perfect. I guess the final question I’d like to ask you about is in sort of the executive buy-in and dealing with some of the political aspects. When you often have large organizations, you may have some well-entrenched executives that maybe they don’t quite get Agile or they may be stuck in their ways, so can you give some suggestions if you had some people that are working on their Scrum teams and running into some roadblock with their upper executives? Do you have maybe some book recommendations on anything you’ve worked on or a colleague worked on that may be beneficial to recommend to an executive?Jeff: In many companies – my company, Scrum Inc. does a lot of management workshops. Mostly with the senior management. With the middle management, you want get them all in the certified Scrum Master training so they really understand how it works and what they need to do from a management point of view. Without that training and education, it’s pretty hopeless because management – if management doesn’t know what Agile is, then they tend to do things that actually disrupt it and cause it to either go slow or fail outright. Just out of being clueless. So education and training is really critical.At the end of the day, there may be people that are more interested in maintaining their empire than they are in furthering the organization. And senior management has to deal with that. I remember one global telecom company went completely, 100% Scrum all at once and the Scrum trainer that was leading the effort was communicating with me, he said: Yeah, is this going to work? And I said I’ve already written a paper on this, it’s called ‘Hitting the Wall’. What happens when you take a global organizations, take them to Scrum all at once.What happens is they run into their biggest impediment really fast, and depending on what the management does at that time, that will tell you whether it’s going to be successful. And the Scrum coach and trainer said they’ve already hit the wall. I said: What was it? He says there were 30 managers that were getting in the way and the CEO just fired all of them. So at the end of the day, there may be some housecleaning needed.Ronnie: Yeah – but that’s one of the greatest advantages to Scrum, it’s that it really exposes what was already there. Well, I think that’s an excellent suggestion. If it comes to organizations that I’ve personally worked at, have provided certification, training to some of their middle and directorial-level positions and I do think that was really helpful. And it is very interesting that you mention that you do have workshops for some senior management and that’s really great to point.If someone wanted to find out more about yourself and about your company and the services that you provide, where do you recommend that people take a look?Jeff: Well, they can certainly go to our website: ScrumINC.com. They can send me an email: jeff@scruminc.com and I’ll get back to them.Ronnie: Excellent. And do you have any particular books or works that you’ve written or your colleagues written that you’d definitely recommend?Jeff: Yeah, there are two books that were written last year. One of them is actually really good for managers – it’s written as a novel. It’s the story of a company that was in big trouble; how they brought in Scrum and how they turned a disaster into a success. And it’s not a long work, you can read it in a few hours and you really get the basic ideas. The other more IT-focused book that I did last year with  Ken Schwaber ‘Scrum in 30 Days’ and both of these books are on Amazon. An even more interesting book is up on Amazon but will not be released for a few months; it’s called ‘Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time’. And it is a book for the general business reader and Randomhouse founded this in their business book ‘Division’ and they wanted it at least 80% of the examples outside of IT. And so this is a really good book for the general business guy to get a handle on what is Agile, what is Scrum all about? What are its benefits, what are the key principles? How can it help my company? So, ‘Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time’ – you can go to Amazon and preorder it.Ronnie: Okay, excellent. I’ll definitely provide links to those. That concludes all my questions. Jeff, I’d like to thank you for your time, I really appreciate it!Jeff: Okay, thank you! I enjoyed talking with you! Thank you for listening to All Things Agile. We look forward to you subscribing to the podcast on iTunes and leaving a kind review. Thanks and God bless!

A fresh brew: Vic is joined by Jon Jorgensen (@waterScrumBan) and Brett Palmer (@Brett_Palmer) for another morning of Agile and Coffee. In this episode, our heroes discuss the following topics: pre-review of “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time”, Jeff Sutherland's upcoming book from Crown Publishing. we'll be holding a review of the book in an upcoming episode, including book giveaways – stay tuned how does this book relate to Joy, Drive Collaboration Explained and Tribal Leadership? Nerf Gun Economy inspiration from S.Bowman's “Training from the Back of the Room” Brett recommends the video of Katie Brown, WA State Teacher of the Year Proximity Switch Estimating, with Lasers a tool for estimation on par with planning poker the (upcoming) Agile Open of Southern California Reach out to Vic (@AgileCoffee) on Twitter –  and use the hashtags #askAgileCoffee or #tellAgileCoffee to interact with us on an upcoming episode.