Thursday, March 3, 2011

Scrum Q&A with Jeff Sutherland

Insightful and compelling Q&A session with Jeff Sutherland yesterday.

The most notable questions were:
  • What place do timesheets have in Scrum?

    Basically the answer can be found on Jeff's blog here.  Succinctly, (and I paraphrase) "When I am hired as a CTO or similar the first thing I do at 8am Monday is abolish time sheets. They are a waste of time"... "Teams should only be working on one thing at a time and the CFO knows what all our salaries are, so capitalising costs is as easy as calculating number of days multiplied by salary costs".
  • With all the Scrum stats and measures measuring the team performance how do you do individual performance reviews?

    His answer was: "At 8:15am I move on to abolishing performance reviews..."  See his blog posts here and here.
    Again, its a practice he believes does more harm than good.  Feedback should be given at the time of the event, both good and bad.  Salary reviews are done when asked for by employees and they need to give evidence they deserve an increase. By showing peers externally at other software companies earn more money, or by creating positive public opinion and press. Thereby increasing the companies sales through brand-awareness. Very interesting.

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