Profile: Jeff Sutherland, PhD

Jeff Sutherland started the first Scrum at Easel Corporation in 1993 and worked with Scrum Co-Creator Ken Schwaber, to formalize the Scrum development process at OOPSLA’95. In the same year, Sutherland provided Kent Beck background information on the creation of Scrum to help him create eXtreme Programming. 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 is CEO of Scrum, Inc. and Senior Advisor to OpenView Investment Partners. His venture group is run by Scrum, invests in Agile companies, and trains them in Scrum as the best business practice for software development. He has been CTO and/or VP of Engineering of 9 software companies and is Scrum coach to over 20 portfolio companies for the venture group. Jeff started up using Scrum seven years ago at PatientKeeper and involved the whole company in the Scrum process. He has helped extend the company-wide Scrum model to many companies in the U.S. and Europe. 

Jeff  helps to strengthen Agile software development implementation in venture funded companies by provide coaching, mentoring, and training to development teams. OpenView investments require full implementation of Scrum and/or XP with strong product ownership and highly motivated teams that can demonstrate continously improving velocity of software production and quality of end user experience.

Training: Jeff’s public and in-house Scrum Certification courses train hundreds of developers every year from all major countries in the world. His experience with Scrum teams in leading companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Palm, Seimens, and others provide practical experience that is useful to new ScrumMasters, Product Owners, Team members, and management.

Mentoring and Coaching: Dr. Sutherland is an expert in distributed/outsourced Scrum and CMMI Level  Scrum.

His 2006 publication on distributed Scrum documented the highest performance software development project every recorded for systems over 1,000,000 lines of code completed by SirsiDynix in the U.S. and Exigen Services in Russia. He has worked with Xebia in the Netherlands to help productize the fully distributed Scrum model. Xebia used developers in the Netherlands and India to show that hyperproductive performance on local teams can be replicated when the same team is distributed across continents. They now use the fully distributed model on all projects and find it to be faster, better, cheaper, and cooler.

Jeff''s introduction of Scrum into a CMMI Level 5 company in Denmark has reduced rework from 10% to 6%, increased productivity by 100% for large teams, and allows them to bid on fixed price contracts at half their previous rate. This was achieved while still meeting CMMI Level 5 certification requirements with project estimates within 10% error, and project completion rates within time and budget of over 92%.

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 revenue generating Google AdWords project. He personally supports Scrum implementions at many other companies in the U.S., Europe, Russia, and Latin America (GE, M3 Media Services UK, BellSouth, Siemens, Medco, Philips Medical, Sony/Ericsson, Johns Hopkins APL, Trifork, IBM, Systematic Software Engineering, Accenture, St. Jude Medical, StarSoft Development Labs, GSI Commerce, Guideworks, Wellogic, Healthwise, DigiChart, Baufest, Barclays Global Investors, Ulticom, Constant Contact, Rosettastone, Inova Solutions, Nortel, Crisp, Xebia, Exigen Services, Ultimate Software, Insight.com, OpenView Venture Partners, FinnTech, Planon and others).