Performance boost of Agile

David Anderson in his recent post about Jeff Sutherland's speech mentioned Jeff's mentioning (looks like I began to spread rumors) 2x productivity improvement after deployment of Scrum in a CMMI Level 5 organization. Very impressive achievement especially for the company that has been focusing on continuous improvement for at least some time. This together with "official" data on CMMI performance, which suggest over 62% productivity improvement over non-CMMI processes, gives this company enormous advantage over an average competitor.

What would be interesting to see is what was so wrong with the original process that deployment of Scrum allowed to squeeze 200% of productivity out of the same resources. In my opinion greatest improvements come from eliminating waste. But I just do not see how waste can be sucking 50% of capacity of a CMMI Level 5 organization to give 2x productivity improvement when eliminated. Would be be very interesting to know details on how such a great achievement was possible.