I help Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Product Managers Grow w/ Books, Classes, Courses, and Community. Author of the ”Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide;” Trainer at Scrum.org
There is a strange obsession in organizations with #velocity. Somehow, it is still believed that velocity is a valid #metric for a #ScrumTeam — although we know all too well that it can and will be gamed if enforced as success metric from the management. What explanations have you heard why an organization, nevertheless, considers velocity to be useful? #okr #agile #noestimates
Ade Lovett
4y
From the Real World side of things. Velocity is Product Idea to Production Deploy. Anything that slows that down simply needs to die.
If I think velocity is starting to be used as a performance measure I encourage the team to switch from points to t-shirt sizes (or vice versa), or to change the point scale. Of course I'm already known as a troublemaker, but it gets a conversation started about what points should and should not be used for.
Ben Kooistra
4y
It’s rather simple. Use #velocity to improve #efficiency within the Scrum team and management can use the velocity as trend to improve #effectiveness with the delivered value from the teams. Of course it’s important to match the teams onto the wanted and needed business value, prioritized within the business portfolio. That’s what we call #scaling
Bob M.
4y
It is a strange obsession given what most of us know by now. Estimates / velocity continue to be tallied by some teams because they've never questioned the value (or because it provides the illusion of controlling risk). As an itinerant developer evaluating potential gigs, if I hear the words scrum, estimates, or velocity, it's a red flag to look elsewhere because it means I'd be working with product amateurs and spending a chunk of my time devoted to low-value ceremony.
I will recomend read the next https://www.infoq.com/articles/sutherland-scrum/ where Jeff Sutherland, expose four metrics for scrum teams and scrum adoption.
Add a column to the far right of your scrum board titled "awaiting positive feedback from customer" and measure velocity by counting epics exiting that column. Harder to game? Not sure...
Jerry Shih
4y
It is the same reason that organizations use the words "effective" and "efficiency" in the same breath. What is the point of being efficiently ineffective?
Craig Imlach
4y
Velocity as a metric is fine, the problem is a lot of organisations see it as the objective.
Nothing wrong with using velocity as a metric (and necessary for stakeholder management), but, as with all metrics, be well aware what you are measuring. In this case productivity (so efficiency, and not effectiveness - so you are building lots of storypoints but are those the right storypoints, those that add most value). And... again, as with all metrics, be aware of Goodhart's Law. Velocity is meant as an internal metric to help the team improve and not to be used by management to push the team to "work better"