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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Blame Is Stupid. Don’t look for bad people; look for bad systems—ones that incentivize bad behavior and reward poor performance.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: A revolutionary approach to building teams, beating deadlines and boosting productivity

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

“I didn’t want to pick on him, but the fact is, in project after project, people cut and paste and throw in boilerplate, but no one actually reads all those thousands of pages.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

“Actually showing the product was powerful, because people were, to put it mildly, skeptical of the team’s reported progress. They just couldn’t believe Sentinel’s progress actually kept moving at a faster and faster rate.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

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

“Changing practices is one thing; changing minds is quite another”
— Mike Cohn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Trying to restrict a human endeavor of any scope to color-coded charts and graphs is foolish and doomed to failure. It’s not how people work, and it’s not how projects progress.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

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

“If you can’t actually take time off without having to make sure everything is going right at the office, the thinking goes, you aren’t managing your teams well.”
― Jeff Sutherland, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time