Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by Jeff Sutherland and J.J Sutherland
Scrum. Scrum, scrum, scrum, scrum, scrum, scrum. My Bible, and perhaps it should be yours too! If you lead a team, this book is for you. If you are on a team, this book is for you. Which is to say, this book is for EVERYONE. As you’ll read, this book can literally make anything happen faster. Building a house? Scrum. Designing a website? Scrum. Creating a shopping list? Scrum. Got it?
Some of my favourite takeaways include:
- Good team size. 4-6 is optimal, 20 is way too many.
- Multitasking is a myth – people who think they’re good at it, actually are the worst. The truth is people are serial processing, not parallel, and it takes the brain longer to switch gears so all you’re doing is slowing yourself down.
- Prioritize based on how much the action will affect your goal (whether that goal is $ or something else)
- Don’t be a D*ck: Managers need to have zero tolerance for incivility, disrespect, or abuse in the workplace – it actually sucks energy and makes everyone ineffective
- Don’t waste your time looking for Evil People, look instead for Evil Systems.
- Construct your to-do list as follows: To Do, Doing and Done. Move left to right.
- Don’t create Master Plans. Create Micro plans which you can do in time-limited sprints and then iterate. This also goes for task size. Create small, bite-size tasks.
If you want to move faster, and be more effective, this is the book for you. We’ve seen a 200%+ increase in how much we are able to do each week as a result of implementing and tweaking Scrum. Here is more information on how we did it: https://magistrateinc.com/how-scrum-trello-doubled-our-marketing-agencys-productivity/
