Jeff Sutherland: How to work less and make more: 10 rules

Jeff Sutherland — Advisor to venture capital Fund OpenView Venture Partners, CEO of Scrum, Inc. and author of SCRUM management system that helps to optimize their efforts, described in the eponymous book. In this article he talks about the ten basic principles of this system.

1. One meeting a day. In fifteen minutes you will be able to coordinate their projects, to send the right command path and to detect obstacles to move forward. Stop trying to hold meetings where all the report on the work done, and enough for two hours a day to find someone else to blame.

2. Work must be visible. One of the main reasons why the time in companies is spent in vain — the team members don't know what you are working on others. This leads to duplication, wasted efforts, and the work is not over, above what you need to work on the same, to work on something unimportant. If you'll just stick the slips with the names of the tasks on the wall in three columns — "to Do", "Done", "Done" you eliminate a huge amount of extra work. People in the fastest companies know what their colleagues work.

3. Teams should be small. If your group more than 9 people, it's too big. The smaller, the better. Lots of studies show that small teams cost less, produce more and produce results faster than the large. A team of five people will work faster than a team of twenty. If the project is late, it may throw additional people is not necessary: it will only complicate the process and even more it will tighten.

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4. Do not need agenda — mark concrete results. Prior to each meeting, each member should clearly understand what the purpose of the meeting. Do I need to make a decision that cannot be taken any other way? Each meeting should produce some result. If this result is impossible to formulate, cancel the meeting.

5. Forget about positions, tear business cards. The best teams have only one position: Member of the team. Studies show that the more specialized the functions of the people in the organization, the slower it will be. If necessary, save the job titles for external use only. But inside the team they just slow down, and significantly.

6. No interruptions. People are very bad with multitasking. Research clearly shows that people who think that they do well, in fact, cope's disgusting. Every time you switch from one task to another, with the preparation of the report by email, your productivity drops sharply. Do whenever one or the other. Allot for work time without interruptions. You will be shocked how this improves performance.

7. Only one project at a time. When you ask people what part of their time they dedicate to some project, usually less than 50%, and often less than 20%. Assign team members 100% to do one project until it is ready. Then move on to the next. We have seen in many companies as the management announces a project task number one is essential. But the people to whom he is committed, he did not spend 100% of their time. It's amazing, but very common.

8. Prioritize. Often in organizations at the same time is four or five projects, and people relocating from one to another. Everything is a priority. But when management come from this, actually this means that priorities do not exist. Focus on the project with the highest value. Put it at the forefront. Bring it to the end and grab the next one. Focusing on one project, you will finish all five projects faster than when you make them at the same time. And you or your clients will earn them a few months earlier.

9. It is not necessary heroism. When someone makes a heroic effort to save the project — that is, to complete it successfully and within budget, — such people usually clap on the back and praise. But heroism is not a sign of greatness. It is a sign of a deeply dysfunctional system. Why needed this heroism? Due to poor planning? Heroism should be viewed as an organizational failure, not celebrating it.

10. Burn the sheet of accounting of working time. Measuring the number of hours that an employee spends on a project is a meaningless metric. But for some reason it is on this basis that we pay our employees, make contracts, appreciate the effort. We get what we start to measure. And does it really matter how long it took to create something? Perhaps the main indicator here is not the result of a not created value? Measure what the output is, and then you will produce more value in less time. We have in SCRUM is the slogan:work less, do more. To equate the time and effort is stupid. published 

 

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Source: ideanomics.ru/?p=2910