Imagine your team’s line manager insists that a successful team improves velocity regularly. How could you, as a team, satisfy this strange, unsuitable demand without working more? How can you make gaming velocity a reality?
I run this exercise with my students of entry-level Scrum Master and Product Owner classes to help them reflect on the tricky nature of measuring success, metrics, and, of course, Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
For the following article, I aggregated suggestions from more than 50 classes on how to “best” game velocity.
In this article, I explore the pitfalls of ‘The Illusion of Velocity’ in agile contexts, peeling back the layers of traditional metrics as leadership tools. Moreover, I point to the advantages gained from leadership engaging directly with teams.
Understand why servant leadership and practices like the Gemba Walks are crucial for coping with complex, adaptive environments toward actual progress. Moreover, get an idea of how to start flipping outdated hierarchies and embrace the natural rhythm of productivity and innovation.
TL; DR: The Minimum Viable Library for Scrum Masters
The Minimum Viable Library is available! Explore a series of carefully curated collections of essential books, newsletters, podcasts, and tools to elevate your agile expertise.
Read on and learn how the recommendations for Scrum Masters cover a wide range of topics, including Scrum, servant leadership, customer value creation, coaching teams, improving team dynamics through Retrospectives, and navigating agile enterprise transformations.
Agile teams thrive on continuous improvement and adaptability. Self-assessment isn’t just a health check measuring tool but a compass guiding teams toward their potential. It enables teams to understand their strengths, identify areas of improvement, and delve deeper into work dynamics beyond mere output.
The true essence of self-assessment in Agile is fostering transparency, collaboration, and relentless improvement. It’s not an audit; it’s a mirror reflecting a better version of your Agile team.
This article comprises a few well-known self-assessment tools; use them or have them inspire you to create your own assessment.
Ideally, a metric is a leading indicator for a pattern change, allowing your Scrum team to analyze the cause in time and take countermeasures. However, what if you picked the wrong metrics? What if these useless agile metrics lead you in the wrong direction while providing you with the illusion that you know where your team is heading?
Learn more about useless agile metrics, from individual velocity to estimation accuracy to utilization rates.
Let’s stop guessing and start crowdsourcing data and information on this critical topic: Who is using what metrics under which context to what success? Participate in the agile metrics survey now.
Update 2020-12-14: We have joined forces with empiriks.de, a German consultancy specializing in statistical analysis, and we plan to take the study to the next level. The Agile Metrics Survey already complies with academic standards. However, what we need now is more participants to improve the sample size.
So far, we have more than 750 contributors; let’s strive for 1,000 contributions by the end of January 2021 and aim to publish the report by the end of March 2021!
