A Data Scientist’s Journey to Scrum
I will be very honest that my first impression of “Scrum” isn’t the greatest, and it got worse after attending a few “daily standup” meetings, which often turns into a meeting providing daily updates to the manager, even though for most data science projects, you can hardly make any meaningful progress within a day. Therefore, I had a hard time understanding how Scrum is supposed to help us get more done and work more efficiently.
After reading the book — Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, written by the person who invented Scrum, I finally understand the spirit of Scrum, and how it can help us work more efficiently.
As someone who likes to optimize almost everything in their daily routine, I find this book fascinating and would encourage anyone who’s interested in being more productive to read the book. You might be tempted to just read a few articles online to understand what Scrum is, but what this book offers is the Why — why Scrum is designed the way it is, how Scrum came to be, and what are the problems Scrum intends to solve.
Without knowing the why, it’s easy to misunderstand and misuse Scrum — for example, having a daily standup meeting that’s not really helping the team to be more productive. The point of having the daily standup is to learn about what’s stopping people from making progress, and remove those impediments so that the team can get to the finish line faster, instead of listening to people’s lengthy updates about what they accomplished yesterday.
On top of learning the Why behind Scrum, here are some interesting things I’ve learned from this book.
(1) If something isn’t working, blame the system, not the people.
You might be tempted to find someone to blame when something went wrong. However, it’s important to keep in mind that most people have great intentions, and blaming them hardly solves the problem while costing you the relationships. To ensure the same mistake doesn’t happen again, take a closer look at the current process/procedure, and fill the gap in the current process to prevent the mistake from happening again.
(2) Human brains aren’t wired for multitasking
No matter how appealing it is to multitask, doing so actually makes you slower and worse at both tasks due to “Loss to Context Switching”.
People don’t multitask because they are good at it. They do it because they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another activity.
(3) Working too hard results in more work
As someone who views working hard as a virtue, this is very eye-opening. How is it possible that working fewer hours let you get more done? Turns out people who work too many hours start making mistakes, so you end up spending more time fixing the mistakes that could’ve been avoided in the first place. There’s a limited number of sound decisions you can make in a day — as you make more decisions, your ability to regulate your own behaviors starts to erode, and that’s when you’re prone to make mistakes.
(4) People aren’t happy because they’re successful; they’re successful because they are happy.
But what are the things that make people happy? They’re the same things that make great teams — autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Autonomy: the ability to control your own destiny
Mastery: the feeling that you’re getting better at something
Purpose: knowing that you’re serving something bigger than yourself
Last but not least, I would like to share this beautiful quote by T. E. Lawerence that the author quoted at the very end of this book,
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
