Project Description

Description: Get your team to work faster and smarter. Rank priorities so your new startup adhere to lean methods.Book_Cover_Scrum

By: Jeff Sutherland

Notes:

  • He pretty much invented the agile method to software development
  • Before he invented it, people use to rely on the waterfall method and it would lead to cost overruns and other issues
  • First steps if to list the features that are most needed, because 80% of the value comes from 20% of the features
    • Don’t rank by importance, but rank by value.
  • Almost impossible to know how soon a project will finish, because it depends on how fast a team works
  • Healthcare.gov was built using a waterfall technique
    • No one took accountability for the whole project
  • Sprints: intervals of work
    • Plan the sprints to deliver real functional goods at the end of each sprint
    • At the end of each sprint, use the feedback to measure velocity
    • Use each sprint to remove obstacles to the flow of the work
    • Plan, do, check, act
  • Steps:
    • Make sure everyone knows the number one objective is to produce
  • Always hire from within. Zappos wants people to grow within the team
  • Only three roles:
    • Product owner: decides what the work should be. They use persuasion to figure things out
  • Steps to implementing scrum:
    • Create a backlog of the work you need to do to get to your vision (wedding, business, etc.)
      • These are the stories they need to make (EPICs) to explain what they need their system to do to be a compelling purchase
        • Have everything that can possible be included in the backlog
    • What are the items that have the biggest business impact?
      • What are the easiest to do, can deliver the biggest value for the lower risk
        • Idea is to deliver value to customers as soon as possible (80/20 rule)
  • Break up the product delivery into increments and get feedback on each until you have the product for consumers. Just make the functional prototype
  • He who can survey the quickest rate of change survives
  • He wants everything to be transparent. Financials, etc.
  • Happiness predates success
    • Zappoes was one of their success factors
    • Each employee is bought up to speed about how he culture works
  • Epics
    • These are stories that are so big, they need to be broken up into smaller stories of actionable things for people to remember
  • Sprint – how to
    • Write down all tasks
    • Prioritize by what needs to get done first
    • Estimate how much effort / time it will take to finish
    • Make sure to finish all tasks by the end of the sprint. Nothing left over
  • If a process seems stupid, it is, so eliminate it
  • Working too hard, makes more work
    • Overworked employees get more distracted and distract others and make more mistakes. Work fewer hours and do better work and shorter time people.
  • Generally takes longer to fix something than to fix it
    • It also takes 24 times more effort to fix something later than it is to fix something right away, because you have to recreate the thought process from the beginning
  • Multi tasking is impossible. Talking and driving is a great example
    • The process to switch from one thing to he next takes too much effort
    • Focus on only those tasks that are related so you don’t leave that zone
  • At the end of each sprint, have a demo that a person can use
    • Never let things be half done T the end of a sprint
  • In daily stand ups, you don’t just do a status update, you ask for and offer help to clear roadblocks
  • Lost all the tasks that need to get done and allow people to work on whatever parts they want to move the whole team forward.
  • Don’t blame team members. Blame the system that they work in
  • Brain can only hold four chunks of data
  • Great teams have:
    • 1. A sense of purpose. Transcendent
    • 2. Autonomous. Self organizing and Mgmt
    • 3. Cross functional. Have all the skills to complete the product. Feeds off each other’s skills. Look for people with diverse skills.
    • Can’t impose these things
    • More than 9 ppl on a team, then the velocity slows down.  The number of communications channels is too many to hold for a normal human. For a team to work well, they need to know what each person on the team is doing
    • Adding more people late in a project slows it down.

 

Summary – How to begin in a nutshell – 9 mins from the end of the book

  • Pick a product owner (has the vision of what will be accomplished. Have passion for the product)
  • Pick a team (who does the work, has all the skills needed. 3 to 9 ppl)
  • Pick a scrum master (coaches rest of team through the framework)
  • Create and prioritize a product backlog (evolves over time. Product road map in order of priority)
  • Refine and estimate the product backlop (team looks at each items to make sure it’s doing. Definition of done. Create visual value? Don’t estimate in hours. Use relative size: small, medium, large. Chapter 6)
  • Sprint planning (fixed length of time less than a month; forecast how much they can complete in a sprint; look at speed of last sprints to measure velocity)
  • Make work visible (do, plan, done; use sticky notes;)
  • Daily standup (max 15 mins, Discuss: 1. what did you do yesterday, 2. what will you do today, 3. any obstacles?)
  • Sprint review / demo (show what’s accomplished during the sprint; only demo what’s completed)
  • Sprint retrospective (what are the improvements in the process; don’t blame people; agree on 1 process improvement to see if that 1 solution improved the team speed in a controlled environment)
  • Immediately start the next sprint