Innovation: Jeff was the Chief Engineer for the Object Studio team that created Scrum. He defined the roles and hired the first Product Owner and ScrumMaster and led the effort to build the first series of products created with Scrum. In 1995, Jeff worked with Scrum Co-Creator Ken Schwaber, to formalize the Scrum development process at OOPSLA’95. In the same year, Sutherland provided Kent Beck all background information on the creation of Scrum. XP engineering practices then evolved along with SCRUM and the two leading Agile development processes work well together. Scrum and XP are the most widely used Agile processes worldwide and their creators are authors of the Agile Manifesto.
Jeff has been VP of Engineering and/or CTO for 9 software product companies, developing Scrum in 4 of them and introducing today’s standard Scrum methodology to 5 of them. Many of his Scrum Certification courses are held in the PatientKeeper Boardroom. Here, participants work within a company that has been totally driven by Scrum for seven years. As part of the class the PatientKeeper Chief Product Owner goes over the PatientKeeper Product Backlog and explains how PatientKeeper delivers production releases of software into large healthcare enterprises at the end of every Sprint. He will describe the PatientKeeper MetasScrum of all stakeholders that he leads weekly. There all Sprints can be stopped, started, resourced, or changed every week making the entire company Agile. The PatientKeeper tracking system has automated Scrum tools for real-time management reporting, reducing ScrumMaster reporting to less than 10 minutes a day and developer overhead to 1 minute a day. This is an order of magnitude more efficient than traditional approaches to project management.
Training: Jeff’s public and in-house Scrum Certification courses train hundreds of developers every year from all major countries in the world. His specialty is instilling "Kaizen mind" in his students. This Japanese best practice is essential to high performance Scrum teams. The need to improve the productivity of established Scrum implementations led to development of a two day Scrum Tuning and Program Management course in partnership with Rally Software Development Corporation. This course advances the state of the art of Scrum practice by seamlessly integrating lean development principles with Scrum implementations.
Mentoring and Coaching: Dr. Sutherland is an expert in distributed/outsourced Scrum and CMMI Level 5 Scrum. His recent joint paper with SirsiDynix in the U.S. and StarSoft Development Labs in St. Petersburg reviewed the most productive distributed/outsourced development project ever reported. This year he will run Scrum Certification courses for StarSoft in St. Petersburg, Russia, to further enhance their high performance outsourced Scrum teams. He introduction of Scrum into a CMMI Level 5 company in Denmark has cut CMMI planning overhead by 80%, reduced rework by 40%, and increased productivity by 100%. This was achieved while still meeting CMMI Level 5 certification requirements with project estimates within 10% error, and project completion rates of over 95%.
Consulting: Dr. Sutherland has been a Scrum consultant to Microsoft, Oracle, Palm, Yahoo, Ariba, Cadence, and Adobe in Silicon Valley. His recent Google Tech Talk helped Google teams evaluate and extend their Scrum implementation on the globally distributed Google AdWords project. He supports Scrum implement ions at many other companies in the U.S., Europe, Russia, and Latin America (GE, M3 Media Services UK, BellSouth, Siemens, Medco, Philips Medical, EOS, IBM, Systematic Software Engineering, Accenture, St. Jude Medical, StarSoft Development Labs, GSI Commerce, Guideworks, Wellogic, Healthwise, Baufest, Barclays Global Investors, Ulticom, Constant Contact, Rosettastone and others).
.