Scrum in Construction - Dr. Jeff Sutherland

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  0:00  
I was talking to the CEO of a big construction company recently. And he realized that his teams were too big. And if he cut teams, from 10 people to seven people, he could get as much as more done. And his margins would increase by 30%. And he went out of that meeting and said, I'm going to revolutionize the construction industry. So watch out people is coming back to you.

Felipe Engineer  0:33  
Jeff, I gotta tell JJ that you knocked it out the park. Welcome to the nbfc show, the easier better for construction podcast. I'm your host Philippe engineer Henriques. This show is all about the business of construction. Today's episode is sponsored by construction accelerator that design and construction industries come up with and build great things. But we also build in waste in how we do those things, in our interactions, in our contracts in our logistics. So what does this do for our bottom line, or our next project, the best firms maximize their value by removing that waste, and only doing what's essential to the work what makes them money. Construction accelerator will train you to see the waste and give your teams the lean tools and experience to remove it immediately. All online. Construction accelerator is made up of three to nine minute videos that can be watched again and again, in the field, at the office and at home. All broken down by topic. need to learn pool planning, we have videos on the process, how to set up a room and how to kick off a team need to set up a target value delivery project, we discuss all the aspects of TVD especially cost. Or maybe you just need to brush up on five as well. We have videos on that as well. You can download and print reference materials to use on site to immediately translate watching into doing subscribe today at tri ca now.com. Let's build an industry, not just a project. Today's show is also sponsored by the lean construction Institute. LCI is working to lead the building industry and transforming its practices and culture. Its vision is to create a healthy and thriving industry that delivers outstanding project outcomes every time for everyone. Check the show notes for more information. Now to the show. You've been at a conference for a day keynoting how's your morning been going so far? 

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  2:28  
Well, I spent the morning in China, Indonesia, Turkey, beggar poor. And then I saw the late morning in Portugal.

Felipe Engineer  2:36  
So you've been like all over the world today. Jeff, did you cross the midnight time zones a couple times in those different countries? Right, right. I've done this a couple of times with this platform. The last handful of shows JJ show was done in this platform. But he blurred his background so you don't even realize like how freakin good he looks in high definition. I mean, Jeff, you know, you raise the good looking boy There you go. We got the laughs here. I got my laugh tracker here. Jeff, I want to just hit this bell to just give you some audible gratitude for just all the stuff you're just giving away for free. So thank those bells are for you, my friend. Appreciate you and YouTube d d just did a great panel discussion with me. Boston University agile conference, not even an hour ago.

Dee Rhoda  3:27  
You know, I just want to recall a story about when Jeff and I were co training a scrum at scale class together. He and this is back when you could travel and Jeff was out. Jeff always has at least two Mac's sitting at his desk. One is running the slideshow for the class. At that point in time Jeff had a dog named Zephyr and Zephyr was battling with some with some health issues. And so Jeff was in real time getting getting biomechanics on Zephyr and regulating in real time the medications he was giving Zephyr and simultaneously jumping in wherever he was supposed to. And even when he needed to. On the training. He's just the man has mad skills, madman skills in so many different directions. And that's me giving him a shout on. Yeah,

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  4:10  
I was like, Who was that I had my computer up and I had medical devices. So my two guys said, you know, we'll do much programming anymore. I said well, the 10 devices you know, all run program. Yeah.

Felipe Engineer  4:37  
Hey, the old habits are hard to give up. Jeff, you know that. That's a good assumption. We're all on Macs here. This is a Mac trio right here. The three of us. We should get Apple to sponsor this podcast someday in the future. Yeah, yeah. This is awesome. Thank you so much, Jeff and D I want to start with gratitude after give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves the audience that listens to the show our Design and Construction professionals from around the world, in over 30 countries. And I just want to give a shout out to everybody who listens to the show and watches on YouTube. Thank you so much for tuning in every other week, the response has been amazing. And I absolutely do this for each and every one of you. thanks to people like Jeff, Andy, is there anybody that the two of you would like to give some gratitude for? Shout out to anybody you want?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  5:23  
Well, I just got off the Line with people from China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Turkey. And these were all the Agile communities from these different countries. And they all did videos of what they're doing. And then we had question and answers. And so I like to thank all the people around the world that are making it happen with respect to Scrum.

Dee Rhoda  5:48  
Yeah, my shout out is to Jeff, for giving us this amazing framework to do this amazing work all around the world. And my next shout out fleabay is to you shout out to you for inviting us on and for continuing to help me through the journey of Scrum and design and construction. I really appreciate the time we spent together as Sacramento last week's huge thank you. Thank you. 

Felipe Engineer  6:10  
Thank you, right back after Dee and Jeff, thank you guys both so much. And when I started this podcast, Jeff, in July of last year, I knew that I had to use Scrum to make it happen. And the trajectory has been exponential with the growth and the listeners around the world. Just like yourself, you know, I've had calls from people in Turkey as well, they have a very strong, agile group there. And I was I had no idea until you know, we started doing this type of stuff. So thank you for inspiring me, Jeff. And thank you to the whole nbfc show team that makes this happen. I haven't said thank you enough on air. And I'm giving you guys the shout out. Thank you so much for making the show. Amazing. So with that, I can't do right, if we don't think a product owner the help to make this happen. Thank you, Noah, for good. Getting on Jeff's calendar and letting this happen. I appreciate you so much. No, and I share some spirit animals together. So no, I wanted to open up with that gratitude moment, and give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves. You can go in any order. You want to let people know who you are. And if they don't know who you are, which would be incredible. But surprisingly, everyone on planet earth Jeff doesn't know everyone yet. There's 7 billion of us out there. Tell the people a little bit about yourselves, please.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  7:31  
Okay, well, I started off actually in the military as a fighter pilot in the Air Force. And all the operational aspects of Scrum come from that experience. My last tour was as a professor of mathematics at the Air Force Academy. And towards the end of my retour, I was recruited for at the University of Colorado Medical Center to become a medical school professor for over a decade. And they wanted me to take over a big grant that used about $30 million to do massive supercomputing modeling the human cell. And out of that research came really the theoretical aspects of Scrum, how do you get systems to evolve quickly? And what are the interventions that you need to make? From there, I was actually recruited out of the medical school to industry into a big banking company running 150 bags, basically, has their CTO for 150 bags. And as soon as I came into that operation, I was working mainly on their advanced technology, but I was watching their projects. And they were always late, like many of the construction projects out there, right. And I said, This is unbelievable. The way the way they're managing the projects with these Gantt charts, is guaranteed to make every project wait and I ran the numbers being a professor of mathematics. I ran the numbers in the analysis. And I showed it to the CEO. And I said, not only all your projects late, they're getting later because every time one's late, they have more meetings and more reports. It just makes it worse. And he asked me, Well, what should I do? And I said, Well, you need a completely different operating system. I said, we can't change the back hole back all at once. But we should take one of the business units. Let's take the business unit that's losing the most money. And let's introduce a new operating system with small teams with short iterations. With a product backlog. Someone coming in every morning and prioritize by business value every Friday we'll go to deploy to 150 banks. And I'll teach them how to land a project every week. Just like I taught fighter pilots how to land aircraft. And sure enough, within six months, that business unit was the most profit Business Unit in the back. So that's, that's my background. And now I'm taking it to the construction industry. Right?

Felipe Engineer  10:06  
We are. Well, I remember 2016, you told me I was the first person to, to be coming through with with Scrum. And I said, Jeff, I won't be the last one, I promise you that we need to do things differently as well, which is perfect. segue to D. D, please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Dee Rhoda  10:22  
I'm a principal consultant over at Scrum Inc. and I got here via the traditional project management routes. I've been in a number of different industries and finance was one of them as well as Jeff and I've worked with Wells Fargo Prudential US Bank. And finally, in 2008, I said that we've got to stop this madness. I'm not having any time. I'm going to work every day just counting down the hours when I get to leave, knowing that I haven't made any kind of an impact on anybody. But I've updated my Gantt charts, and everything is wonderful, right? So So I heard about this thing called agile and I got intrigued and I started bringing that into Wells Fargo actually and into there, believe it or not crop insurance division. Yes, there is such a thing as crop insurance. So and from there, that team implementing team level Scrum prompted me to take a look at why can't we change entire organizations. And that's when I was very lucky in starting to read some of what Jeff was was describing as scaling Scrum, which is actually something Jeff had been doing all along. This isn't Scrum at scale isn't something new, Jeff started this right from the get go. And then started really focusing on transforming entire operations and tire companies into agile. And along the way, I was starting to hear in the back of my head, my dad talking to me fleabay rest is so my family owns the highway heavy construction company. And my dad was even back then 2030 years ago always looking for ways to improve his industry to improve his company. And I started to feel as I started to see Scrum in action that, hey, we could have been using Scrum back then to accomplish some of the goals My dad was trying to accomplish in the highway heavy industry. And so from that point on, I've been looking at ways to do that. And and the opportunity arose in the introduction to you, Philippe and ever since then I've been as you know, and I'm not not lockstep with you, we're learning everything I can about Scrum and construction. And, you know, we put it together it's coming construction for Scrum masters class last year. And we're gonna do it again this year. And I'm really pleased that we're gonna continue to advance this in advance Scrum in this industry. So thank you, Felipe, for helping us with that.

Felipe Engineer  12:46  
Now, you're welcome. I told Jeff The last time we were training D, you might remember I said, Jeff, you've done so much for me and for so many other people. I'll live my entire life and not have touched on percentage of what you've given us all as a gift. And I mean that with sincerity, and you're just the right type of mentor. I need a Jeff. I want to just hold for everybody and just show. This is just some of the books that Jeff has recommended that I read. So I'm holding 30 pounds of books I'm barely can hold it up. And I'll tell people what the what the title is. Some of these books are just I have to tell people all the time, Jeff, like I don't get any money from you or from scrumming for for pumping the red book, The Art of doing twice the work and half the time and I tell people, just like you do all the time. If you want help and where to start. Start with reading Why? Scrum. You did a great job here. I'm not going to ask you why you created Scrum because it's it's already captured here. It's in the red book. Like people check it out. Get the audible JJ Jeff sun CEO Scrum Inc. reads that book. It's fantastic. That's where you should start. That's where I started, or start with the scrum guide. It's free right now. And it's all 12 pages long. One of the first things I want to ask you, Jeff, before I bring in some of these other books that you've recommended, highly encouraged me to read and I did. They've been transformational, by the way. So keep learning everybody if you're out there. Look, even Jeff still reads HBr articles and brings new information to us all the time. The Scrum values Jeff, you did a video. It's on YouTube, at Scrum Mike's channel where you talk about the five Scrum values respect courage, commitment, openness and focus. And you tell this story about an oil executive. You know for people that haven't found Scrum makes channel can you tell? What do you remember about that oil executive talking about their work before they had the values of Scrum?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  14:43  
Well, the oil company I really remember I'm not sure it's the same one was operating in in Colombia and they have embedded Scrum at scale can the average time to drill was this was mainly a gas. So these gas wells average time to drill was over a month to fast Save every drill the well in history was 10 days. after implementing Scrum at scale, the average build time is six days. The reason is that the, for some reason the oil industry Scrum works really well, because the senior executives really get involved they, they often become the Chief Product Owner of the operation. And they make sure that Scrum is implemented properly. But basically, that that rack that you know, twice work, and half the time means that you're drilling is in 1/4 of time, right? And the main reason for that there were many, but one of the main reasons was the executive team started meeting every day as a scrum team daily Scrum meeting. And so now they have these problems, you know, there are some vendors driving to the jungle, and it's caught in the swamp someplace, used to take three weeks to get out of the swamp, how they're doing in three days, right? Because the executives are right on top of it. And so that they say, you know, that's the major driver. And this kind of thing is true in all construction, right? Why does construction projects get delayed? Something happens is unexpected. And it takes two or three weeks to get the right people in the right place to fix it. If you've got executive leadership meeting every day as a scrum team, it gets it can get fixed within a few hours or at a minimum within a few days instead of weeks. And that's really, if you really drive success in construction.

Felipe Engineer  16:25  
Those transformational Jeff and one of the values to that you hit on when you talked about all five values. You told a story about an oil executive that said that his job was soul crushing.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  16:37  
Ah, okay. Yeah, this is british petroleum. A woman I don't want to say her name because I might get in trouble. But she told me she caught me in the hallway at their headquarters and said, Jeff, you know, I was known as the isolating. I had 1000s of people working for me. I was mean, they worked late. They were weekends. I had no mercy. I had no mercy on them. But the problem was, it was soul crushing. Now that I've got a scrum, people are working normally hours, they're getting a lot more done, and they're actually having a life they can see their families and children. And my, my spirit has been fried.

Felipe Engineer  17:29  
That's amazing, Jeff. Yeah, the I was studying another book. Katy Anderson wrote a book called Learning to lead leading turn with Sal Yoshino who worked at Japan, he was the one that hired john shook, the first American. And we use this phrase all the time, like, like, you know, in lean, we have to have respect for people. And one of the things that he co said, or we call him your sheknows on total is the respect for people as it's translated and talked about at Toyota means holding precious what it means to be human. You can't be you know, that command and control with people, if you embody that value, that the values that you talk about, often, we and the same is true for people to talk about the Agile values. Sometimes the people that are new to these methodologies and frameworks, lean or others, they don't understand the invisible things, like the five Scrum values, or the three pillars. Is there anything that you want to say, Jeff, to people listening about the values in particular, that especially if they don't even know what Scrum is, and of course, we'll put links in the show notes. So people can go get an overview of what is Scrum? 

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  18:39  
What would you like people to know, the five barriers come can wrote a book on project management with Scrum. And one of the things he did a wonderful write down, how is it that it actually works as well as, at the time I was CTO of a company called patientkeeper healthcare company, and he was a consultant there. And so he looked at the environment there. And he said, you know, the first thing that's really different is that it's an open environment, everybody can speak their piece, everybody is listened to. And this openness and transparency allows you to see what what is going on what the problem is, what to do next. And in order to have that openness, you have to have respect for people that's fundamental to getting the data on the table to make decisions in the right way. And also, the people need to have courage to both speak up and really then to try something new. And take some risk. So, openness, respect and courage are the way to get decisions on the table. that allow groups to focus. And once people can focus on real data and have real agreement, out of that comes commitment, which is the fifth value. And it's commitment that drives success. And there's a famous Paul by a mountain mountain climber commit. And he says, As soon as you commit, there are forces that come into play, that start to help you and leverage you and you achieve things that would never be possible. Without that first step of commitment that really draw forth, not only your energies, but the energies of other people to get the top of that mountain, so commitment is been elevated again, in the scrum guide in the new release of the scrum guide, where it's central to teams committing to the product product goals of the product owner, and committing to the sprint goal and committing to get things done meet the definition of done, that's great, too. So these values stack up what on the one on top of the other that that makes it really happen. So without them, if you have an environment where people are criticized all the time, they won't speak up so that nobody really knows what's wrong. Nobody really knows how to fix it. And you wind up with endless problems, and you feel like nothing is ever going to get fixed, right. So it all starts with openness, transparency, and you don't get that without respect for people.

Felipe Engineer  21:39  
Right on Jeff and Dee. You saw last week, we're on the site. In lean construction, Jeff, we have a parallel that we call project first thinking where people on the project commit to achieving the goal of the project itself, like the project for the for the end user for the client is going to do something transformational for people. And D got to visit with us on the on an ice center project where they're going to be helping to restore people site and maintain eye health for people in need in Sacramento, California. What of the values Dee would you like people to know or think about?

Dee Rhoda  22:13  
Well, to your point there Felipe. It's that bigger, why it's that vision of why all those folks are on that job site, what they're doing and what the impact of their being there and what they're building will have on their community. And you mentioned it earlier as well. Because we've we've all been on conferences, we are written in a conference earlier today to where we talked about this and Scrum and construction because the interest is so high right now. And it's it's just that the everywhere I went on that job site fleabay. Every day, when I went into the construction trailer, when I was out on the site, the vision was visualize and what this eyecare Center was going to look like and the conversations that were occurring in in the trailer around committing to the work that was going to get was going to be done that day and moving forward was all around not just the building, but what the building was going to do for the community, and how it was going to help those that were going to use that Eye Care Center for eye health and for vision. So but for as as far as the values I just, I've get I've been asked this question numerous times, what is your favorite value? And it's it's very difficult to answer that question. Because in my my very consultants answer is it depends. In what in what respect. So are you asking the question for me, though, respect. If we can show all human beings respect if we can treat each other as human beings, so we can go so much farther together than we ever could as individuals, whether that be in a building an eyecare Center, building a day database or writing code, if we can just respect one another, so much more can happen.

Felipe Engineer  23:55  
Now, that was what would lured me into D. Jeff, in your red book, when you talked about the poor developers and how you stood up, and you told them that they'd been abused, and acknowledging the abuse that they'd suffered in a corporate working environment. I had the same type of stories in the designing construction industry. I've had hundreds of people Jeff come to this shoulder and put tears down, you know, in hugs, sharing stories of some of the things that they've had to go through, and the challenges of going through the work and, you know, this type of systemic approach to work. It makes it so that we can work together regardless of your background. The things that people have been able to achieve using Scrum has been a game changer across the planet, like COVID. For a lot of companies, Jeff, and this is where I want to go with next you did a cool talk that I got to go to where you had Dom invited you to talk about failure. They were talking about the challenges at COVID. And you had some great stories about company That could not adapt and what was happening. Jeff, could you talk about the worldwide corporate or company failures and challenges that you're seeing with the pandemic, and going into the future?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  25:13  
Well, the pandemic, to me has been a great divide between the agile and the non agile. In the United States last year, just in the first half of the year, there were 3600 bankruptcies, there. Many of them were big, well known companies. And so when the COVID environment, non agile companies go out of business, and we have the we've had the biggest destruction of business in the history of the United States in 2020, because of what's happened, and but if you look at the companies that we tend to work with, and particularly the companies I've invested, they have had the best year of business in the history of the company. Their stock prices are like a rocket ship. And it's not just Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, it's many smaller companies. Tesla is gone out of sight. And it's, it's been so dramatic that I've actually had to form a separate investment company, I'm spending almost half my time now running an investment company that invests only in Agile companies, because they are so incredibly successful and COVID that it gives them such a competitive advantage, they just grab all the market share. Because of that agile companies just have no way to compete. The other thing about Scrum that's surprising is that it can work just as well it is distributed environment. As we are now we're all on some, you know video conferencing system, right? That Scrum works just as well, there is if you're sitting in the same room, you have to have a little more focus, but it can work just as well. And so one of the senior vice presidents of Biogen, one of the biggest biotech companies, you know, when we went into lockdown, last March, he sent me an email, he said, Jeff, thank God, we started implemented Scrum, October 219, because he said, as soon as within the lockdown, within a week, we will back to normal operations remotely. And he said many of our competitors, they will not come back to normal after until after COVID F. And here we are almost a year later, it's not over yet. And he said they are going to be flatline, they're not going to be able to function, they're not going to be able to improve. They're going to lose market share, and we are accelerating. And even when they come out of COVID, it's gonna take them a year or two to even catch up back to where they were when COVID started. So he said, Thank God we have already.

Dee Rhoda  28:11  
Same thing happened over at that global manufacturing company that we are helping out. We were we had implemented Scrum before COVID hit there. Their stock actually increased last year by 80%. During COVID. And they attribute that to having brought in Scrum. They were able to pivot they were able to adapt, they were able to move in the directions they needed to move to because they had Scrum in play when COVID hit.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  28:40  
Yeah, this is one of the biggest hardware companies in the world for agriculture.

Felipe Engineer  28:46  
I've had people even tell me, Jeff, that it seems like you've cloned yourself. And there are five of you running around. What's your secret? And I was like, well, I read and you don't because it's very public, that I do Scrum every day.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  28:58  
Like do you have a Dee, you know, you're ready route and making it happen. Right. And I'm, you know, I'm encouraging as much as possible. 

Felipe Engineer  29:05  
know, we need your encouragement just because I was telling Dee before I said, you know, working with you more last year, I realized that I wasn't doing enough, like I had more to give. And that so I had to give more. And I had a software company contact me shout out to my friends at skill signal, and asked me to do some advisory board responsibilities for them. And I said, Of course I need to think about it because I knew what was in my backlog. And I knew what my capacity was, it was a no brainer. I said I was looking for, for somebody. And I had committed to serving and giving my time on a board and just like you said about commitment, Jeff, the phone call. And the connection was almost that same day. When I made my mind up it happened just like that.

Dee Rhoda  29:52  
Yeah, but Felipe, let me ask you a question if you hadn't already been using Scrum in your world and you would have gotten that phone call. How long would it have taken you to figure out whether or not you could take in that additional work day? 

Felipe Engineer  30:05  
If I wasn't using Scrum, I would already have been done. I would have had, I would have died of a heart attack or a stroke. Because, yeah, Jeff, you don't you don't know this, Jeff. But I used to drink two pots of coffee a day, and work over 100 hours a week and work seven days a week, and I couldn't keep up. And then I learned lean, and it got a little better. But when I learned Scrum, I tripled my output and then tripled that multiple times over multiple times a year. And I told D The first time I started working in this role for my, this general contractor, McCarthy building companies. I started with just working with six project teams in your in the first six months. And because I was using Scrum and learning and, and having failures and adapting, we scaled that up to now work with, you know, six to 12 project teams a month. Yeah, I could not have done it without Scrum. Impossible. And I've looked at the other methods to Jeff, because I'm always looking, you know, what else is there? I've had some friends that have said like lean is the solution to everything. And I said, No, the solution to everything is everything. But you got to find what works for you at the right time at the right moment. And for me right now, Scrum is the cat's meow.

Dee Rhoda  31:18  
And you and I were talking about this just the other day how Finally, after like 20 years, the construction industry realizes that lean, lean is not a thought it has to just be there. It has to be within their within their world. The goal now is to get them to understand that you can't do it with lean alone. Because to what we've been talking about, the people are important. And Scrum really helps to focus on the people aspect of it. Yes, lean is very, very important. But where are the people in that equation? Scrum brings the people in. And I found that to be very impactful when you were you were explaining to me the suicide rates in this industry.

Felipe Engineer  31:58  
Now, Jeff, we have the highest suicide rates of all the professions in the United States since 2019. You're more likely to die by your own hand in construction than to die in a construction accident. It's incredible, like worldwide. I just remember the worldwide stat Dee I think every 90 seconds across Planet Earth somebody takes their life.

Dee Rhoda  32:22  
Yeah. And so seriously. And I say this often. And I don't say that lightly here. Scrum can literally change lives in the construction industry. If we can implement Scrum across more of this industry, we can save literally save lives. Here's what I can absolutely guarantee you your listeners. Implementing Scrum will cut that suicide rate by more than 50%. I guarantee it. I've got a case of champagne.

Felipe Engineer  32:50  
Oh, I'll take that bet. Jeff, I've been working with a team of collaborators from across the United States. Since last year, I had a gentleman on my show used to be a writer for Jay Leno. If you remember Jay Leno, Jeff? Yeah, he used to be a writer for him, Frank King. And that's his life's work, working to help bring awareness and change and give people opportunity. And he brought the stats because I was unaware. I didn't know because apparently, D we're not supposed to talk about our feelings and construction, even though you know, that's not the case. Right? Just a little bit of time on our job. That's that. There were there was a lot of feeling going on there. There was a lot of emotions. Yeah. So Jeff, I'll take that, I'll take that bet. Let's make it happen. And I'm going to take that back to my friends that are working on that initiative right now. So that we can have an impact on that and give people a chance to contribute and be part of the US. Not just the scrum people but just us the people on planet Earth.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  33:51  
Okay, getting the people talking about what their problems are sharing with each other helping one another, you know, watching each other's back. That's what, that's what's going to keep people alive in the construction industry, right?

I just said, I saw that happening firsthand. out in Sacramento. Last week I saw I saw a senior Superintendent Jeff somebody I would describe as like a scrum of scrums Master, right, really working hard to change the culture of that construction site by doing things like retrospectives and feedback loops with with his teams and with his with his, his project engineers, which I would refer to in our world as the scrum masters. Right. And, and in creating a culture for them where they're now starting to feel empowered with sleep. We've been talking about this, I can't stop talking about this because I'm so jazzed up about that senior superintendent and the changes he was trying to make to put the people first and to create empowerment, to do retrospectives, to look at ways to continuously improve on that job site each and every day. That was fantastic. And that will let it Well, to individuals and teams actually enjoying coming to the jobsite, every day knowing that they're just not another person playing around in the dirt, you know, keeping the wheel moving on a cog, right?

Felipe Engineer  35:13  
We're there, Jeff, the the project manager, as a guy also named Jeff, shout out to Jeff from Jeff. And Jeff. I was telling DEA this morning at the at the BU agile conference, I said, it's a testament to how powerful Scrum is the teams using Scrum in multiple different ways on their project, that the project manager in the thick of it can be on vacation for a week, and there were no dire emergencies. He didn't have to be calling into meetings, he could actually be with his family, and take the time to have his life back and be stress free. And everyone was was happy and enthusiastic about it. And they were happy to have us there and show us all the cool stuff that they were doing. That's not typical. That's not typical. That's one of the differentiators. And I've got too many stories to share. But I don't I want to tie this up with me talking about it. That's why webinars are for do that separately. Want to hear from you guys. So Jeff, you know, you're on that note, I know that you've got your background in medicine, however you Scrum in with that, that guys and industries, can you share some stories about how you're helping, you know, transform life for people around the planet?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  36:29  
You know, back in 1996, I was hired as CTO of what was that time I dx systems. Now GE Healthcare was one of the four biggest healthcare companies. And I came in and fairly quickly changed the whole architecture of the systems development, I got that all in place. Within a year, it was all in motion. And that's why I was saying, Well, what do I do next. And then people started calling me and asked me to do talks. And one talk was from the government committee on healthcare data. They said we're holding a conference on healthcare data. And we want you to come down and be one of the one of the presenters, we want to decide what to do with healthcare in the future in the United States. And so I pulled together I had five positions that actually worked directly for me, in my group development group of many hundreds of people. I call the physicians together, I said, you know, we're going to get down there, and we're going to talk about what the problem is. And what the problem is, is that medical error is caught as is the third leading cause of death. It's, yeah, it's related to data and that you don't have the right data in the right place to make the right decisions. But it's it's not about it's not about systems, it's about stopping the medical error. And that requires changing the way the processes the way we work. And I went down there, we put together a presentation. We went through it. It was so hard if I remember the head of the American nursing Association, she just was putting her hand over her face, she couldn't even and at the end of the presentation, the chairman says to his medical expert, is is Southern. Correct. I have put I had cited everything I said I cited for medical papers. And the medical experts that Seville is conservative. So out of that, the committee went to the National Institute of Medicine and started a major project on patient safety. And they've written multiple books. And so now everyone in the medical community knows that this is a problem. Unfortunately, the systems have not changed. Even though now there's an awareness. There's still almost as much battle with medical errors as it was 10 years ago. So we actually have to start changing the way the operations run with scrub. This is where this is not enough. And as an example of that, one of the things we did recently we went into the biggest Hospital in Boston, they wanted help and expediting their surgery. And in two weeks of scrubbing, we cut that surgery turnaround time and half. surgery we went up 20%. Now the effect of that on hospital revenue, this is a $7 billion hospital. 50% of revenue comes from surgery. 20% increase in surgery means 10% increase in revenue 700 million free dollars every year to that hospital flow into the bottle, bottom line, but two weeks of scrubbing. This is the power And, you know, I, we need to be careful with your listeners. It's not Scrum that's the power. It's, it's like that example you gave before the the senior manager go away and actually be on vacation without worrying it, because the teams were taking care of it. So the pieces of Scrum, one of them is training teams to be self managing, right? Right. That's independent of Scrum. That's a fundamental way of working that if you teach people to self manage, when you're away, that everything's not blowing up, right? 

Felipe Engineer  40:39  
Because self managing fix autonomous people, it's a sometimes scares management, but it's exactly what you want, because you can't be there all the time. Absolutely.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  40:50  
And to get that autonomy, you need the openness and respect. It's all tied together. But what's the the umbrella Scrum is just an umbrella for these practices that are absolutely critical for workflow for happiness for results, to get done, and it's so effective ever 1995 I explained this, some venture capitalists brought me to lunch, I explained what I was doing. And they said to me, you're some kind of hippie flower child from San Francisco, this will never work. 2006 11 years later, they come to me, they say, you got to save us agile is putting us out of business. We've got to get agile now. So you know, at the end of the day, it's all about what really delivers. It's not just talk, it's setting in place, the principles and the ways of working tinyme self management that actually create teams that can actually deliver and deliver independently without constantly being micromanage, right.

Felipe Engineer  42:04  
Oh, that hospital story, Jeff is incredible. Because, you know, health care, as we're getting older, you can't tell from my receding hairline getting older every single day. It's something that we need more and more thanks to technology. here in California, I was able to talk to my doctor through my my phone, which is something that I could not have done before. And I had a little, little thing on my finger, you can't even see it because it's already healed. And she was able to give me some guidance for a little, a little cut on my finger that I didn't pay attention to because I don't pay attention to things like that. It was I was just thinking, like, you know, when we've grown up as kids, that was impossible, you had to a doctor had to be with you to treat you. And now here we are in 2021. And it can be done using technology to enable, I can still get the care without having to, you know, go somewhere. And without having to take her away from something.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  43:00  
This is actually one of the hidden benefits of COVID. It's actually, you know, the medical industry has had telemedicine for years, but there's been no insurance incentives or kind of against it. But now with COVID we have to do it and so now I only see my doc on zoom. I mean I I have a doc that is a Denver and I'm in Boston, I work with one of the best Doc's in the world so you can find the best doc on planet and then have that person be treating you. That's going to be a lot better for your longevity, right? telemedicine. It doesn't matter where that doctor is.

Felipe Engineer  43:36  
Thank you doctor for keeping me alive. I wanted to to ask the both of you in the new Scrum guide 2020 guide, love it. Absolutely love it. The word lean makes a strong debut, which I was very happy to see. What What do you want to say about that change?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  43:57  
Well, in 2016, a senior vice president of one of the biggest Japanese companies flew to Boston and he came there to communicate that he wanted to develop a joint venture for Scrum ax agile training program. I said Why do you want to do that there's already training in Japan and we get a lot of stuff going on. We don't want to send a lot of people in Japan. I said, Look, I spent 10 years in Silicon Valley as a senior executive at Google. I'm now back in Japan. The training they're giving a Japan is not adequate. It's not the true Scrum. So it's a What do you mean by the true Scrum you said? The true Scrum is the scrum with the grandfather's Professor Takeuchi and nonaka. And in their paper in 1986, where they coined the term Scrum project management, they were looking at lean hardware companies, the best lean teams around the world. And so, Scrum needs to teach the best lean Teams how to be even better teams. And he said, We are 20% owned by Toyota, we are going to be the trainers for Toyota. So we need to go in there and train them how to do lean better using Scrum. So, Scrum has to be not only lead better than and we need your team and they're in Japan to put that together. And so we immediately learn several things we need, we need the basically tools that we've always done on our site, I've always done my scope training, you know, value stream mapping, process efficiency, the a three process root cause analysis, all these things are fundamental to removing impediments. You know, scrubbers are about removing impediments. But a lot of Scrum masters can't remove them because they don't know. Lean Right. Right. Lean is about removing waste. That's what Tony Hsieh says in the book, right? So it has the best tooling for removing impediments. And so every Scrum Master needs to start there. And then we need to add on there, there are several other things we need to add on. To make it better.

Dee Rhoda  46:11  
I mean, plus one, two, Jeff, I mean, yeah, it's it's a no brainer that we would that Jeff and Ken would put lean into the scrum guide just for this for what the same reasons that Jeff has just mentioned. So not really much to add, other than to say thanks for getting it in there. It's a no brainer.

Felipe Engineer  46:28  
I love to read books like guilty. And I like to read a lot of stuff by Deming. And one of the things that Deming made famous, you know, he had done some time at Bell Labs, or one of his mentors, a guy named Shu heart, worked at Bell Labs and helped to create the PDSA loop or the PDCA, loop plan, do check, adjust. Which one of the one of your contemporaries earlier made famous as the ooda loop that you put in the scrum book, observe, orient, decide act. And I want to give a shout out to Chet Richards, who wrote this book that you recommended to me, Jeff called certain to win. That gives a phenomenal background and how powerful it is to get into that framework. What do you want to tell people about certain to when Jeff who's a good person that should read it, because it's not for everybody?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  47:18  
The thing that, you know, Professor nadaka, is writing a book today, basically, on the ooda loop, because it's about the US Marines. And what he's telling me is that the ooda loop is more important to to today than the PDCA cycle. And the reason is, that if the ooda loop that allows for the innovation. And as we've introduced Scrum, actually into Toyota, they responded that wow, Scrum is not Kaizen. It's kikaku. It's revolution, because we're doing Kaizen, and then all of a sudden, hey, we should just change the whole organization. And we'll just work a lot better, right? That's revolutionary, and it's not normal Toyota. And they are being eclipsed by Tesla now, because they cannot respond fast enough. And even last week, Japan, the Korean government announced that by 2035, you're not going to be able to sell any gasoline cars in Japan and the CEO of Toyota, Toyota went, you went nuts, oh, this is this is impossible, you destroy the whole Japanese industry, we can't have that. Okay, they're still they've got their, their heads in the sand. They won't budge, they will innovate, that's going to kill them. And so the ooda loop, observe what is happening. reorient, change your whole business model. Come in, in a different direction. And, and an act make it happen. And then based on the thing that happens next, execute another ooda loop. That's what certain to win is. And if you keep doing that, if you can get inside the decision loop of the opposition, you win 100% of the time, that's why certain certain to win is about winning 100% of the time by executing this observe orient act decision cycle. So this is this is absolutely critical to Toyota and to any lean company that they raise the bar and lean and bring in the ooda loop. And scrub as he is his way of them to do it. That's not me talking. It's Professor Tanaka, who is is a national treasure in Japan. Last November, there was an article in the major Japanese financial journal every day about Professor nanaka his life because His history is a national treasure. The to the Japanese country, were both with one voice telling that to the Japanese, and to Toyota and to any other lean company. This is critical for your future success.

Dee Rhoda  50:17  
So to answer your question, Philippe, who should read that book, anybody who wants to get ahead of their competition? And absolutely, to Jeff's point, I would say any Scrum Master who is worth their salt will understand how to remove impediments. And that book will help them understand how to remove those impediments. 

Felipe Engineer  50:35  
Right on, you heard it here, ladies and gentlemen, check that out. And then with that, just want to pick up, Jeff, I wouldn't do it justice if I didn't. Yeah, I had the pleasure of sharing a virtual stage in Brazil, with one of your buddies, Mr. James Copeland, who wrote this book, the patterns book, and we didn't speak on the same day, and he doesn't know who I am. But it's totally cool. I loved his talk. And I've been reading this book, and you can see I've made a little dent in the book, I'm about 30% in with the seven other books that I'm simultaneously reading one at the time, though. You're simultaneously reading and one at a time, I don't get back, you got to back that up. Well, to back that up in another another episode. But Jeff, the work that you guys did, I mean, this book is heavy. This is like, I don't have a ruler on me. But you can see it's, it's inches thick. And it's called a scrum book, The Spirit of the game. It's available. It's widely available, widely available, you guys have made it so easily accessible to so many people. I want to say so much about it, Jeff, but I want to let you please tell people what is this book? About? Where did it? Where did it come? Why did it come to be? And how long does it take to get this book out here?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  51:56  
Well, we started that book Jim said it's gonna take 10 years to write this book because that's what it took for the last one agile organizational patterns. And Scrum is a patterns based implementation, one of the early papers on Scrum goes to okay Scrum is put together with a set of patterns whose works and patterns in this context are part of the scrum patterns movement, which has been around for over 30 years, and has a copyrighted workshop methodology for coming up with the kind of patterns that are very famous architect talked about in his books about architecture, Golding. So you could say that this all comes from construction. And Christopher Alexander, notice that certain buildings were different from other buildings. Some of them were more beautiful, some of them were more spacious, more open, some of them to walk into it, it made you feel more whole as a as a person, because a building felt more whole more natural, a call that this quality without a name. So it's something that was hard to put your finger on. But he did cross cultural research all across the world. And he found more than 80% of the people and every culture would agree that this building had the quality without a name. And that building did not. So then he went through, okay, one of the patterns of construction that create this quality without a name. Now, Jim Copeland was one of the key people that brought those ideas in this software development building software system. And over 10 years ago, we he came to me, he said, Jeff, we should, we should do this for Scrum, and build a set of patterns around Scrum. Because one of the challenges, you know, the scrum guide is like the rules of the game, but playing the game, that's a whole different thing. And we don't want to be prescriptive, but we want to show patterns of play that have been successful for many different companies that have been proven by sometimes massive amounts of data. So that people can pick them up, they have this problem, they can say, hey, this, this strategy has worked, you know, at Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, maybe if we try it, it might work. So so they have some, some starting point to really leverage them. Now I'm mainly focused on particularly the patterns that increase team performance. And one of the first patterns that was approved some of these patterns took five years of negotiation to get them in the book. swarming is one of them, which you've heard about five years to five years. But one pattern only took one hour. And that was teams that finish early, accelerate faster. And it was based on data on 1000s of Sprint's from our Venture Capital Group where the investors had pulled the data together, done the analysis. Just like the author of Good to Great did an analysis, what is the difference between great companies and just good companies? Right? What is the difference between great Scrum teams and just okay, Scrum teams. And just as in good degrade, they found there was only one main difference. And the great teams whose velocity was escalating exponentially, we're finishing the sprint, everything brought into the sprint before the end of the spread. So this was the key that unlocked all the other performance patterns, because we could then say, Okay, this is the baseline pattern, finishing early, what prevents you from finishing early, and then we can go systematically through the things that stop you finishing early, and then create a pattern for each one of those. And then if you package them all up, you're guaranteed to get twice the work and half the time you're, it's certain to win by him to.

Felipe Engineer  56:28  
Jeff, when I did the scrum master training with you in 2016, you told us all you said, if you don't double your team's velocity, I'll give you your money back. You didn't ask for your money back. Did you believe back? No, I mean, I went more than triple. Give me Give me the address. I'll write the check. Jeff, I owe you. Have you delivered much higher than what you said you would?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  56:54  
The head of the veggie group says if you can't do three times the work and a third of the time, you're really not doing it. Right, right. So twice a week and half the time, it's actually a lot easier. It's not that hard.

Dee Rhoda  57:05  
Just a quick shout out to my team. My team is curiosity over at Scrum make Curiosity has taken it upon themselves to go through every single one of those patterns, and identify patterns that would be specific to designing construction. Because my argument is, wood patterns wouldn't be right. So obviously, there are some patterns that are specific to it into software. But curiosity shout out to them. They're going through all of those patterns and identifying the patterns that we need to get in front of the construction industry.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  57:42  
No, why we're talking about construction. I mean, in the in the skunk work, we talked about some construction projects, smaller ones, but the ones that have worked really well. The person responsible, the project is at a scrum meeting every day. And he's pulled all the contractors out and said, Yeah, he's got the backlog. And the backlog is let's get this room done today. The plumbing, the electrical, the pay, or whatever else, our goal today is get this room done. And that kind of strategy guarantees that you come in on time and on budget. And we have an example of that book where a team came in and did that. And then the same construction team went down the street where they didn't have a daily meeting. And they were double the budget and double the tie. I love those. It's almost like a case control study in medicine, which I used to ride you know, you take the same team, same project, you turn on the daily meeting, and then you turn the switch off. And you look at the result.

Dee Rhoda  58:49  
I was really excited to see that daily Scrum in action. With that senior Superintendent Jeff It was really I mean, it was I was like a kid in a candy store as Felipe as want to say, watching him get the subcontractors together his project engineers together walk the board. Okay, what are we going to do today? What's stopping us from doing it? What are we going to do tomorrow? I mean, it was just the simplicity of adding a daily planning session at the beginning of every day and the difference that makes right now and it was great, too. 

Felipe Engineer  59:19  
We were in the owners meeting Jeff, where they were giving an update to people, some people that were remote, including couple architects, and the owners representatives was sitting at the table across from us. And the visual pull planning boards. We're behind them with no walls, sticky notes. And somebody asked a question about schedule, and I saw the eyes shift to the right. He looked right at the board. He instantaneously answered the question. The information radiated and people moved on. They didn't bog down. They didn't have to look at our Gantt chart. They didn't have to, like you know, make a phone call. It was instantaneous. Got the answer and moved on to the next item is It is some of my favorite way to see people working today. You mean nobody had to schedule a meeting to go get information from other people? Do you can, you know, you make sure that I'm telling the truth? I don't think any meetings resulted from that meeting.

Dee Rhoda  1:00:12  
No. And that was the beautiful thing. Yeah, that was the beautiful thing. Everybody got the information that they needed to go bring back to their other teams to continue putting work in place. It was fabulous.

Felipe Engineer  1:00:26  
There was and you know, a lot, a lot of people, Jeff, come to me that are thinking about doing Scrum. And you know, some people learn differently. And we talked about this, we're going through the the train the trainer, vetting process, shout out to Scrum. A Scrum Academy, my God, the work that they do is they need to get more praise. Thank you Scrum Academy for what you do. I always tell people like the way I started, Jeff was I read the Red Book, what and finally got to the appendix. And I was like, oh, here's the How To Guide. It's on the two pages in the best like, thank you, I was starting to get worried, like I was halfway through the book. And I was like, at some point, he's gonna tell me how to do this. And you did it in the appendix. And it worked. But other people can't, or don't like to learn from a book and they want hands on instruction. What are some of the things that you guys have been involved with to help people that need that hands on instruction or opportunities.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  1:01:24  
Well, and in COVID, we are doing multiple juday courses every week with Scrum masters product owners Scrum at scale. And it turns out that remote courses actually have some advantages or in person courses. I think, you know, each have some advantages over the other but the remote course, I think there's a lot more focus, you can actually communicate information more clearly and quickly to people. So people who need more, and there's a lot of hands on exercises with small teams, so people get to work in small teams even over zoom. So people that need hands on training, they should sign up and Scrum Akers got in the ratings scrubbing has got the ratings for the best interaction in Scrum training in the world. Because of the way we've set it up.

Dee Rhoda  1:02:22  
Again, a shout out to Noah and the amazing work that Noah has done. She's awesome. Yeah. But other ways, Felipe that we're able to do hands on is we're actually going into a prior to COVID, we were physically going into these organizations, you know, this global manufacturing organization I'm working with. Now, because of COVID, we've been forced to use different technology. I was just recently working with a Greek company that's building fighter pilot engines. And so we're hands on with that company helping them build something, right? And then again, hey, the How about how about a shout out to the the scrum master class, you and I do fleabay where we're bringing in, we're bringing in folks into a classroom setting, whether it be virtual or real. And we're not only providing them the theory of the scrum framework, we are speaking specifically into their industry and the practicality of the practical use of the theory that we're providing them. So we, there's plenty of hands on opportunities out there for folks who are looking for.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  1:03:24  
Now the great thing about the remote training now is that we get people from all over the world. So there's a training going on tomorrow, the next day, in every training, we have people all over the United States, California to Boston, Asia, Europe, sometimes even in Russia. And so any trading we do is going to have a global perspective, you're going to get input from others, all the all the planet makes it a lot more, both interesting and also insightful.

Felipe Engineer  1:03:58  
Multiple ways to learn, and super appreciate you guys coming on the show and sharing your thoughts, ideas and observations and taking us through. I've got just two books here that I promised I would just at least say the titles. One is by the man, the myth, the legend, Dr. Carter, and his book called accelerate as he Dr. Garner. I feel like he should be a PhD. I'm just going to say that he's like a doctor in my mind. But john p Kotter who wrote this recent book, accelerate the Jeff talks about and is shared, and some of the courses and you recommended to me if you're working in an organization, you know, Jeff, why do you recommend this book, accelerate to people? First of all, john Kotter is the leading change expert out of Harvard University, and that book makes two fundamental points. Number one, agile is a different operating system. It's like the magic And traditional project players like waterfall. And so when you are over operating on the back, you do different things, if you try to do, if you try to do the windows thing on the Mac, they don't work even more important, he says, the Agile operating system needs to be run by agile leadership. If you have Windows trying to run the Mac, it's slow, it looks funny, and often it just doesn't work. And he said, as a matter of fact, he has never seen a sustainable, agile transformation with traditional management running it. So this is a really important thing to understand. For a leadership, you've got to get trained agile managers running the Agile operating system to be successful. You know, as I said, last last year was nice to be agile this year. And if you want to stay in business, you're gonna have to change. And so really, you know, for the Agile companies that agile companies that are growing, they're making being so successful, having the best year in history, the more we can open up jobs. For people who are unemployed by these companies that have been shut down by the 1000s. The more service we can be, you know, to the people in general, and right now it's gonna make we're hiring. We're hiring faster today than ever in the history of the company. One of the things I learned this week is that Daimler in Germany is paying people to quit as an engineer, you get paid $250,000 to quit. Tesla and Berlin is hiring the best of them. That's what's happening, folks. Agile companies are hiring non agile companies or letting people go, that brings me to the last book, Jeff, you Recommended Business dynamics by john Stearman systems thinking and modeling for a complex world. There's the cover of the book. And, and I like it right in the title. everyone forgets that we're all sharing the same system, planet Earth. We're in an open note, you know, convertible spaceship, hurdling around the sun, in space all together. And that systems are fractal. And you saw it when you were studying cancer cells, and you see it in organizations. What parallels Have you seen from your medical studies that you still see happening with teams today, Jeff?

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  1:07:40  
Well, one of the challenges in medicine. I mean, you always go back, there's two things in medicine that were watershed one is like wash your hands before surgery. The other one is vitamin C to stop scurvy. Let me just tell you about one of them. Okay, the Brits found out that if they gave sailors fruit, they didn't get scurvy, and half the ship would die of scurvy when there's certain. So they found this out. How long do you think it took them to start putting lives on the ships 100 years, and they only started putting lives on all the ships when the chief surgeon of the Navy said, it's mandatory to have lines on your ships 100 years later after they made the discovery. And that's what we got going on medicine today. We have things available in medicine that are known that are researched that work that won't be available to you as the average patient for 100 years. And if you want to read about it, go to the Harvard Business Review and read a paper by christison, the guy that wrote diffusion of innovation, right? Just remember this thought medicine that you would not see 100 for 100 years is available. It's here today. It's provable. There are studies, there are political studies that show it works. But unless you go after it and find it yourself, you will never find it.

Felipe Engineer  1:09:04  
That's a good, a good topic. To close this down on Jeff on that serious note of responsibility. everyone listening, the choice is yours for how you want to live and engage in the world. Today, I want to give a big gigantic thank you as again to NOAA for enabling Jeff to be here today with D thank you so much for that Noah. We can't say enough good things about you. We can't, you just can't and the whole scrumming team Jeff, your entire organization. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. I know we're gonna keep talking forever. That's not going to change. So thank you, Jeff. I'm gonna give you both the last words and before I say goodbye to you.

Dee Rhoda  1:09:44  
And I would just circle us back to to Philippe which he had is talking about at the very beginning of this recording and that is the scrum values. It all comes down to the scrum values and the push to put the scrum values at the forefront of what's happening in this particular industry. is going to do amazing things not only for quality, production, profit, but human life. 

Dr. Jeff Sutherland  1:10:08  
Well, I want to say I was talking to the CEO of a big construction company recently. And he realized that his teams which are big, and he cut teams, from 10 people to seven people, he could get as much as more done. And his margins would increase by 30%. And he went out of that meeting and said, I'm going to revolutionize the construction industry. So watch out people is coming back to you.

Felipe Engineer  1:10:44  
I get that name from you after the show's over, Jeff. This was awesome. Jeff. I got to tell JJ that you knocked it out the park. Thank you both so much. Very special thanks to my guest. I'm Felipe Engineer Manriquez. The EBFC show is created by Felipe and produced by passion to build easier and better thanks for listening. Stay safe everybody. Let's go build!