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EPISODE 02

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hello and welcome to episode 2 of the scrum sessions podcast i am q and i’m gary on and we have a very great episode for you today it’s actually the second part of an interview we did with dr jeff sutherland if you haven’t listened to the first part i suggest that you go back and stop right now and go back and listen to the first episode first if you have already done that we have the second episode coming up for you now and it’s a really good one thank you gary on and here’s part two with our interview with dr jeff sutherland brandy you go next hi jeff thanks so much for doing this today um my question you touched on a little bit at the beginning i was curious to know of the companies you worked with when they did go remote with covid how they kept their scrum aligned and moving and if you think remote work is here to stay well remote workers not only here to stay it’s always been there so the the big challenge in scaling is when you add more people you add more teams things slow down the performance per person of the team slows down and this was illustrated by a phenomenon called brooks law and brooks was the head of the ibm 360 project wrote a book called the mythical man month which is a classic and he says every time you add people to a project it makes it late later than it already is so in 2007 i think it is we published a paper on a scaled scrum in the united states and canada that need to significantly expand operations and they decided to double the number of their teams by going to saint petersburg russia for half the teams and the ceo made a really important decision he said i’m going to have every team be half in russia so all teams were remote and uh you can read that paper how they were set up but the interesting finding in the paper when it went for publication in the ieee digital library the academic reviewer said you know you jeff you’ve written this paper like about performance but really this paper is the first time anyone has been able to break brooks law because she doubled the number of teams and the performance per team more than doubled or i would say the performance would team went up so the total volume of delivery more than doubled when you double the number of teams that has never been seen ever in the history of i.t projects so once we understood that and how that was set up we knew how to make remote teams scalable right and so for those organizations we’re working within covid uh if they’re if they’re in our programs in the registered programs they know what to do right so for example a big pharmaceutical company uh vp sent me a note when kobe hit he said thank god we started doing scrum you know last october because here we are in march and now everybody’s remote in less than a week we’re back to normal production all the competition is going to be stuck until coleman’s over and then they’re going to be digging ourselves out so for companies like that that were agile coming into covet the big companies are publicly traded their stock prices just went to the moon and their competitors either flatlined or not a business so we know how to make this work remotely remote work is not only here to stay it’s always been there some of the best teams in the world have done remote right in fact if you have a really big project you’re going to be having people from many different places participating you have to be able to do remote work okay very good back to europe octavian you’re next hello jeff uh um a question about the future from uh from paris france uh so i’m wondering uh how will look like the next agile framework after scrum and uh by the way did you start working on it well you know this is like classic what’s the next lean framework you have to lean let’s look at what’s happened okay so the lien was embedded 50 years ago and more than that probably now and there’s thousands of lean companies in the world but toyota is still the only one that does it well at least in certain parts of the organization and what toyota’s finding out is that scrum is next right because uh they say scrum is you know lean is kaizen small internal improvement but what they tell us is scrum is kai kaku because you’re changing the organization right the japanese tend to be commanding control micromanaging and this totally turns that upside down so then the question is what’s going to happen after scrum well the challenge is with lean it took it took you know over 50 years for something to come along that would actually not replace lean but extend lean because scrum is based on me and the reason it took so long is because lean is the framework for process improvement so the toyota found that people come and visit toyota in 2000 and they say you’re not doing what we’re doing in lean antonio would say well you’re using tools and technologies and approaches that we were using in 1990 but we moved way beyond that in 2000 and so we’re doing things you’ve never heard of because you haven’t been improving right so scrum is like that it’s a process improvement framework that’s that’s always going to be improving and so to get something better it’s a real challenge to uh do that but i can tell you what’s happening right now a lot of you are software people i’m running a healthcare startup and i’m i’m interested in implementing the latest thing from open ai which is i think it’s called gpt-3 and it’s an ai that will write your computer program simply by you telling it in plain english what you want i want an app with this title it has these data items uh here are the boxes i want to see i want to be able to search on this search on that select this and select that you just say it just like it is and the ai creates that program and it’s creating a huge uproar in silicon valley right now that people are saying you know in a few years will they will there even be programmers will they ever be programmers again right we’re all going to be replaced okay so in that environment uh what’s beyond scrum what i can tell you is i was in zurich uh some years ago and a senior person from the ibm research lab in zurich uh kane in one of my sessions and he said uh we’re gonna we’re implementing scrum in the in ai at zurich and the ibm research lab i said wow that’s really interesting do you think it will work in a computer he said we know if it works for humans that work in a computer and i said well how do you deal with you know the backlog constantly changing updates oh we need a new kind of that can automatically change its behavior but he says we have that so what’s going to happen is the ais are going to be using scrum and they’ll probably figure out something better very good thank you so back to the states ramesh thank you uh i appreciate the opportunity thanks jeff so so one of the lean principles is avoid wasteful activities or moda so as a scrum master what thought processes or techniques should we be following to identify wasteful activities during software development well you know the whole scrum framework is designed to surface impediments and what what i what we’ve used at scrum inc since almost the very beginning uh i was in in sweden and i came back and uh sweden had been using the happiest metric to to run their company they said if happy people produce more stuff and that drives revenue and i’d also spend some time in france then one of the leading lean executives came to my scrum training and he said jeff you’re not spending a ton much enough time on process improvement in the retrospective the purpose of the retrospective is to identify and prioritize the impediment that’s going to be fixed in the next sprint and they have to put that in the backlog for the next sprint or they will not be effective so there are patterns now in the scrum patterns book for this but i came back to scrum egg and we immediately implement that in the in the the retrospective of scrubbing we’re going to put an impediment in the sprint backlog in the next sprint and i said let’s use the happiness metric from sweden to decide what impediment so we went around we said okay to everyone given what’s happened this sprint what will make you happier next sprint and then when the scrub master had a list then we would have a discussion okay from the team’s point of view what was going to make the whole team happier given the individual information that we have and then we would prioritize that and that would be in the backlog of the next sprint and the very first time we did that at scrum they said we want new space they were working in a venture capital uh group and they it was too noisy and they weren’t treated as well as they wanted to be they wanted new space and so within one sprint one week we had a contract on new space now the interesting thing about that way of working is i found that over 90 of the time the thing that will make the team more happy is something that will make the work easier and less frustrating and as soon as you make the work easier and less frustrating velocity increases so you know i would always recommend to a scrub master is that they they try this out because it’s just extremely effective and uh this healthcare startup i’m working on right now i’m really the um i’m the product owner but i’m in the retrospective and i’m one of the things i’m asking every respected what’s going to make what’s going to make people happier next week right and we’ve we’ve increased velocity 500 percent in the last six months and we need to double it again um but we keep asking that question in retrospect okay very good soren you’re next all right thank you for your time jeff and thank you for the invite luis um my question has to do with a somewhat unusual i think scenario where um a team for historical and technical reasons ended up managing maintaining developing a large portfolio of point solutions uh and um none of these point solutions is large enough to warrant um its own team for you know a full-fledged team and none of them is active enough from a from a development point of view to warrant that either um they’re all they’re owned by a few different people so you have multiple product owners and they have different stakeholders within the organization so my question is any any uh recommendations or thoughts on how the backlog for the team would be should be managed in this city yeah well first of all it sounds like you’ve got a product on owning every one of those pieces some product owner owns it right so now the product owner need team needs to pick get together and figure out what’s the best best way to support these multiple features which what will be the most effective in terms of flowing backlog into teams uh we found in uh i remember mit had this huge problem because on their i.t infrastructure they it’s basically work off grants so they have you know hundreds of grants in a year once a grant is over there’s no more funding but they have a system now out there that has to be supported so very similar model very similar what did we do so they weren’t doing anything you know a thousand people are down what do we do and nobody does anything and they maybe a couple weeks later they’ve got a thousand people meeting so they have a management meeting and then the management meeting says well maybe we ought to do this but you know it’s a month later and still a thousand people screening finally out of desperation some manager grabs someone and makes it work all night to to get the people off their back and i i pointed out that that is extremely inefficient and what they should do is have implement the interrupt buffer which is a pattern of the scrum book these these patterns are fundamental you cannot get a high performing scrum without these patterns and one of the patterns is the interrupt buffer in mit’s case if they had an interrupt buffer for a hundred teams and they got one one in a thousand one of a thousand grants that is no no longer existence with this product that has to be fixed then the product on the team figures out okay we have 100 interrupt buffers where do we put that problem i explained to the management that could be solved in the next spread with no management intervention by setting your scrum structure up properly and have the product owners doing what they they need to be doing so there are ways to handle this okay very good we have 10 minutes left so let’s see second questions klaus go ahead man all right thank you and thanks for another round so this next question is about spirituality and scrum so i personally have benefited from implementing the values myself in my daily life and i was wondering jeff if you have similar experiences like um on a spiritual level has it improved your your career your life in a more spiritual way um inventing scrum and living it well i don’t i don’t usually talk about this much but for when i was in vietnam in 1966 67 i went on rnr to australia i got a week off in australia and i went down to sydney and i’m just hanging out i went into a bookstore and i was trying to figure find something to read for some reason i came on the this book on tibetan buddhism and that led into from 1966 to 1993 being a student of tibetan buddhism and uh i would go to buddhist conferences i was initiated by some of the most senior tibetan masters and in 1993 i was meditating on one of these buddhist tonkas and i had this encounter they they talk about this with an archetype one of the goddesses and she changed my life and at the time i was at easel corporation where scrum started and i would i would come into work every day after meditating and things would happen i would just feel impelled from my gut to do things that were totally different than what i would think to do okay we have this problem okay normally i would do x you know maybe chew somebody out but i would just feel impelled to handle it differently and then scrum emerged so scrum has emerged out of a spiritual practice and it’s because i would say that my spiritual guide understands how people work she was the tutelary deity of the merchants on the silk road so she’s very wise about business and the way she thinks about business it’s almost like a family particularly like an asian family how do you get people working together and helping whether they’re out everybody’s listened true everybody is respected everybody’s treated well and you need to create an environment where people feel good about what they’re doing which is was completely different from where i came from right and where a typical manager comes from and so that has radically changed my life and it’s given the world scrum and in one sense you know ken and i did not sit down and write down a you know a framework or a methodology scrum came from somewhere else and we tried to document it so people could use it right and so we have many experiences around the world i i one of the one of the most one of the greatest blessings i have is a scrum master if somebody comes to me and says jeff you’ve changed my life i remember a senior manager at an oil company in the uk i happen to be in the head office she catches me in the card and she said jeff before scrum i had a thousand people that i was working day in day and night and weekends and they were always late it was never enough they were under so much pressure she said i was losing my souls with scrum we’ve gone to a normal work week we’re getting much higher production i’ve given the people back a life and i have regained my soul so at a deeper level that is what scrum is all about very good that was a great one i remember actually i remember when you mentioned that one was what scrum gathering austin i believe right yeah yeah that was that that came to mind right now yeah yeah buddhist monk has asked me this question i had to go public exactly exactly that’s why when klaus asked me hey can i ask that kind of question i said i think you’re going to be surprised ramesh you got the last one [Music] thank you thanks for the opportunity again thanks jeff so so my uh second question is like very short so what are some of the activities that the scrum master should be doing in order to increase the flow i what the thing i recommend the strongest i remember i was working with this team in india i was working with the netherlands company who had operations in india and they had an indian team building some scrum tooling and they wanted to know i was working with them from the netherlands and they wanted to know what metrics should they put in this run tool and i said there’s only one that matters and that is process efficiency the process efficiency of each story you know what is the actual work time divided by the clock time for each story and so they said okay we’ll put that in uh for the next sprint so they started the next two weeks spread on monday they had that data metric by wednesday they had pushed across efficiency to 80 percent and thursday morning they were completely done with two weeks of work and it was really funny because they called me up you know we did all the work with zoom they were building actually kind of a zoom thing into the scrum tooling and they said we’re done with everything in the sprint for two weeks so we have no more backlog we don’t know what to do we’re gonna have to talk to go talk to management i told you this would happen if you just proce i i i was surprised it happened so quickly what did you do to make it happen so quickly they said we just put three people on every story so to get that level of improvement in three days that’s a rare thing for a scrum master right so yeah i would i would recommend you take a look at that and today in jira if you use the kanban plug-in it will calculate this for you it’s a metric called flow and uh we use that my team at scrum ink all the time watch that flow you want to get it up over 50 percent very good okay that was it all right guys we hope you enjoyed this episode just as much as we did it was very interesting to listen to dr sutherland’s thoughts on all these different issues make sure you hit the subscribe button to not miss any of our future episodes thank you gary on and guys stay tuned for episode 3 of the scrum sessions podcast i’ll see you soon you