On friday I attended an hour long Q/A session with Ken Schwaber who invented scrum. Overall, it was an interesting meeting. Some surprizes

1. In almost all the Scrum related discussions, burn down chart is highlighted as central part of managing using Scrums. Ken does not believe in it at all. He actually hates it as it shows more precision in measuring progress than we can predict
2. Ken is also sick of zealots for agile programming . He basically said use common sense and do not take any rule too religiously
3. Many people take the scrum book relgiously. As per Ken, book has been mis-understood and misapplied by a lot of people.

For any methodology to be more efficient means it produces more output than previous methodology. More output means either some of the items performed in older methodology were not useful and were discarded or it reduces the time where resources are sitting idle blocked.

Agile reduces work by