Author: Elizabeth Walsh

Throughout the past few years, the Velocity metric seems to have become a polarizing element among Agile teams due to how this data point is being used. Several years ago, the Scrum Guide mentioned Velocity as a recommended metric for Scrum teams. Because of the way this information has been used and misused, it has since been removed as a recommended practice. Similar to Sprint burndown charts and the use of Story Points, metrics from Scrum teams seems to have become de-standardized, as teams are now free to choose how they track and measure their work.

Now that teams have more freedom, you may wonder whether this is good or bad for the teams. While it is positive that the team has more perceived autonomy, they also are at greater risk of being directed to track and report specific metrics to management because of the absence of an industry standard rule on Agile metrics.

Why Do Teams Measure Velocity in Scrum?

Within the Scrum/Agile world, there is no single equivalent of the PMBOK (Project Management Book Of Knowledge) which provides a formal, official standard organizations and teams can point to as “the guide”. Hence, Scrum teams are potentially under a higher level of influence by senior leadership that expects to see a specific measure of project progress, and Velocity is often the metric of choice.

So is the use of Velocity in Scrum necessarily a bad practice? Let’s look at both sides of the argument and see what makes sense to you.

Pros of the Velocity Metric

Velocity is typically a measurement of productivity by an Agile/Scrum team that usually estimates work using Story Points. The measure Velocity can follow units of Story Points or a simple count of total Product Backlog Items (PBIs). Teams usually track this data point on a per-sprint basis. For example, a team may have planned 12 PBIs (with an aggregate of 70 points) and completed 10 of them (totaling 50 points) within a single sprint. The Velocity is “50”.

The data is typically used to measure team performance trends over a period of time; an average Velocity can assist a team to forecast future output and allow the team to plan what business value they can deliver over the next several sprints.

All this may sound fairly benign so far, correct? When used properly, Velocity trends can be a great tool for a self-organizing, self-managing team. The problem arises when this data point is used in unintended ways.

Why Might Teams Want to Consider NOT Using the Velocity Metric?

In my experience coaching Agile teams, I have observed several practices that lead to undesirable behavior by the team, producing degraded morale and performance. Here are a few examples of such practices.

Cons of Measuring Velocity in Scrum

Comparison of Velocity between teams

Because the Story Point measure is a relative scale that is unique to each team, comparing two teams based purely on the total number of points they deliver is basically comparing apples to oranges; it makes no sense and provides no value. No two teams are identical in terms of their skills, experience, knowledge of the problem domain, interpersonal dynamics, or how they approach their work. So it makes no sense to measure their performance using a single, relative metric like Velocity. Doing so can damage the morale of the teams and motivate negative behavior such as Story Point inflation.

Requiring a Team to “Complete More Points Each Sprint”

One common aftermath of comparing team productivity using the Story Point measure alone is that someone in a leadership role will often mandate an increase in team productivity by directing or requiring a percent increase in output; for example, “Team A must complete 10% more points each sprint.” This will often cause unintended behavior such as teams artificially inflating their estimates just to achieve the directed goal; a PBI that used to be five points is now eight points, etc. This type of behavior puts the focus on meaningless increases in the Velocity metric, eliminating its value.

How to Mitigate the Use of Velocity in Scrum

So how should we try to inspire the proper team behavior towards delivering meaningful business value instead of making the metric look good? There are a few variations of the Velocity metric that can help focus the team on improving their predictability and performance.

Percent Complete Versus Planned

The metric I typically recommend over pure Velocity is percent complete versus planned. We can calculate this metric using points or just a total count of the number of work items. For example, if a team completes 10 out of 12 PBIs (or 50 points out of 70 planned), that is equivalent to 83 percent of stories completed, or 71 percent of points completed. The two numbers will probably vary because of the stories having different sizes.

If the team can track this over time—usually at least three sprints—the team will know the average trend, and that will help answer one important question: Is the team performing consistently? If the graph is showing extreme highs and lows, that shows that they need to stabilize the team. The root cause may be variations in team membership, abrupt changes in team capacity, or changes in priorities during the sprint. All of these potential causes provide opportunities for the team to improve. Generally, as a team matures and learns to work together, the Percent Complete Versus Planned should increase since they should know how to plan and execute work more effectively.

In conclusion, measuring Velocity in Scrum can be a powerful tool that can be used for good and for evil. The key is to pay attention to how you are using the metric, as well as the impact it has on your team. If a metric is helping your team do better work and achieve higher quality, chances are you are using the right one. If not, focus on improving by experimenting with alternative metrics that better achieve the goals you’re after.

The engineering industry is constantly evolving. Staying ahead of the curve requires a deep understanding of emerging trends and technologies. In the recently launched The 2023 State of Engineering Management Report, Jellyfish uncovered several key findings in regards to where engineering teams are investing their time, what challenges teams are facing on an operational level, and notable differences between underperforming and overachieving teams. The report underscores the importance of efficiency, engineering leadership, business alignment, and data-driven decision-making. Here’s our take on the results.

Efficiency, a key theme of the report, characterizes a business’s ability to optimize processes and reduce waste. In a manner unseen before, businesses are working to streamline workflows and minimize the number of steps required to complete a task to achieve faster turnaround times, reduce costs, and improve overall productivity. Businesses must embrace efficiency to deliver products and services to market more quickly, to create a major competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Pillar 1: Prioritization and Delivery Management

The Trend

Engineering leadership is another key area of focus highlighted in the report. Effective leadership can drive innovation, inspire collaboration, and help teams to achieve their full potential. By providing clear direction, setting goals, and empowering teams, engineering leaders can create a culture of excellence that drives business outcomes.

The Problem

Engineering leaders commonly question the value they are driving from investments or aren’t satisfied with their delivery organization. Leaders must be proactive about aligning work around value and business outcomes. In some cases, this may require implementing a new operating model or reorganization of the teams to plan, prioritize and implement work.

45% of Engineering leadership cited that their biggest challenge is making sure everyone is focused on the highest priority work

Key Strategies to Employ

While visibility has improved in recent years, it continues to be a key challenge for engineering leaders. There is still much work to be done to ensure leadership is continually aware of certain types of work that are taking time away from established priorities. Here are 3 rules for every engineering leader to increase transparency and build trust and confidence in their teams:

1. Set clear priorities and goals: Make sure that your team knows what they are working towards and what success looks like.
2. Foster collaboration and traceability: Consider uniting, consolidating or integrating your tech stack for the traceability to identify problem areas.
3. Empower team with learning: Forget failing fast, learn fast instead, and encourage teams to do the same by continually leveraging performance metrics and providing learning and enablement opportunities where necessary. Teams can benchmark themselves against performance metrics, and the introduction of performance metrics, when done correctly, can be a helpful way to identify areas of opportunity and growth. Teams mustn’t fixate on one metric, instead employing a balanced approach to metrics, where metrics play checks and balances against each other (ex: speed vs quality).

Pillar 2: Business Alignment

The Trend

Business alignment is another critical component of engineering success. Aligning engineering goals with broader business objectives can help ensure that all efforts are focused on achieving key outcomes. This alignment can help businesses to optimize investments, allocate resources effectively, and ultimately drive better business results.

The Problem

We commonly see that business and engineering teams are out of sync and teams across the board are riddled with issues related to governance and/or gaps in maturity of practice. Misalignment among teams and departments often results in misunderstanding of work, conflicting goals, lack of productivity, and wasted time and effort. If you can achieve better alignment, you can tune business impact, increase operational efficiency, and drive the right outcomes faster.

Key Strategies to Employ

Software development is complex, but it’s important to build towards a holistic view of how engineering drives value. Build toward a solution that increases operational efficiency, team effectiveness, alignment, and transparency of work. Aligning the business around value helps teams collaborate more effectively and change to the needs of the business.

Pillar 3: Data-driven Decision Making

The Trend

Data-driven decision-making is essential to both engineering leadership and business alignment. It is truly the glue that binds them for business impact. By collecting and analyzing data, businesses can gain deep insights into customer behavior, market trends, and detailed business performance. These insights can be used to make informed decisions, optimize processes, and drive better business outcomes.

The Problem

It’s hard to fix what you can’t see, so that leaves organizations hyper-focused on trying to move faster, plan faster, develop faster, release faster and at scale. But, as you move faster, people, process, and technology break down. We see incomplete or missing estimates, missing context, and teams working on things not deemed a priority. This kind of breakdown points directly to data hygiene and governance issues.

Data-driven teams who leveraged Engineering Management Platforms (EMPs) saw significant improvements across the board, including a 15% increase in throughput, 17% decrease in cycle time, and a 9% increase in collaboration.

Key Strategies to Employ

For better or worse, every organization has a process and technology flow that brings them from an idea to customer value. This is called a value stream. When it is optimized through process refinement, integration, and waste reduction, value flows faster. A key component in doing so is applying data to the value stream. Cprime’s analytics and data management services allow businesses to collect, analyze, and use data to make informed decisions. By leveraging data to drive decision-making, businesses can identify areas for improvement and ultimately achieve better outcomes.

Engineering Leadership in 2023

Ultimately, the key findings from the report all point towards a singular goal: driving better business outcomes through effective engineering management practices. As businesses continue to navigate an ever-evolving landscape of technology modernization and digital transformation, the need for reliable solutions integrators has become increasingly important. A solutions integrator like Cprime can help streamline operations, optimize processes, and achieve more lofty business goals.

About Jellyfish

Jellyfish is the leading Engineering Management Platform that enables engineering teams to align their work with strategic business objectives. By analyzing engineering signals and contextual business data, Jellyfish provides complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate. Companies like Mastercard, Priceline, Zoominfo, and Pagerduty use Jellyfish to maximize the business impact of engineering.

For more information about us, visit jellyfish.co

At the time of this writing, which is early-2023, Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) remains the most popular framework in use around the world for scaling Agile teams. Despite its popularity, SAFe is not perfect by any means—no framework is perfect for every situation.

One of the missing components of SAFe is a prescribed approach to handling unplanned work, which is likely a common occurrence for any organization attempting to adapt to an increasingly dynamic business environment. While SAFe does not provide specific guidance on how to manage unexpected surprises, there are a few elements within the framework that you can leverage to reduce the negative effects of such situations.

What is “Unplanned Work”?

Before we explore options to manage unplanned work using SAFe, it’s important to first clarify what “unplanned work” means.

For this discussion, let’s assume that “unplanned work” is equivalent to new requirements that have arisen during execution of a Program Increment (PI) that was identified by stakeholders and/or driven by unforeseen business conditions. In this context, “unplanned work” does not include “discovered” work—specific tasks that the team identifies throughout the PI that needs to be done to fulfill a previously planned Feature or Capability. While the techniques used to address either scenario may be similar, for simplicity, we’ll focus on the former definition.

What Does Success Look Like?

The ability to manage change effectively is key to any Agile initiative. Whether you are adopting SAFe or not, your team must be able to handle unexpected events gracefully  to deliver on your commitments. So, what does “success” mean in this context?

Successful management of unplanned events typically translates to effective delivery of value despite changes in the business environment, which could originate from customer or competitor behavior. Hence, if your team is effective in handling changes in their backlog, you will be able to maximize your chances of successfully meeting the PI Objectives and business goals.

Techniques for Dealing With Change

If your team is applying SAFe, there is limited guidance to assist you in managing changes in requirements. However, if you explore some of the guidance more closely, you will fine some hidden tips that can help you.

Keep an Eye on the Amount of Change With Requirements Volatility

One of the keys to managing changing requirements is to establish and maintain a metric that you may not have heard of: Requirements Volatility. This metric is similar to predictability, but is a leading indicator that enables your Agile Release Train (ART) to keep an eye on the amount of change that occurs within your requirements.

SAFe has several backlogs for maintaining and managing work at various levels, with the Portfolio Backlog at the top of the hierarchy. Most teams that are operating Portfolio-level SAFe will leverage this backlog to manage the high-level business requirements, usually stated in the form of business cases or initiatives. Since this backlog, as with all the other backlogs, is intended to be organic and continuously evolving, it is often difficult to understand the amount of change that is occurring, since there is no “baseline” or “freeze period” that takes place. This means that in order to deploy a metric like Requirements Volatility, you have to take a snapshot in time at regular intervals in order to assess the level of change.

Measuring Volatility

When might be the right intervals to take snapshots? As I mentioned previously, SAFe does not provide any guidance on this, but one approach that I have observed to be effective is to take a measurement at PI boundaries (at minimum) in order to evaluate how much change has occurred within the backlog. This will enable you to determine how many new requirements/epics have been introduced within that period of time.

If you are experiencing significant shifts in priorities within your PI, you may want to take the same measurement at the Program level (within the Program backlog). You could also do the same for the Team-level backlog as well if you observe massive changes in requirements, which is both undesirable and potentially destructive to your ART.

While there will likely be a cost associated with measuring and tracking volatility of requirements, you may observe trends that could alter how work is introduced and/or prioritized, which is an important factor that could dictate the effectiveness of the ART.

Applying Capacity Allocation to Handle Unexpected Change

Another technique that you may consider for managing requirements is Capacity Allocation of your backlogs. Within the backlog at each level of SAFe, you can determine how to organize and plan your work to ensure an optimal balance between Enablers, Features, and Technical Debt. This helps you deliver short-term value and foundational infrastructure to prepare for longer-term functionality that you will need in the future.

One method you could explore is to encourage your teams to only plan up to 80 percent of maximum capacity in order to provide a buffer for expected changes in requirements; if your stakeholders have a tendency to change priorities frequently or unexpectedly, having the extra capacity to address these situations can improve your teams’ ability to continue delivering valuable system capabilities.

One recommendation in this situation is to continue educating your customers and stakeholders about requirements management; help them understand that constant change is not ideal and potentially damaging. Even if your team can deal with this effectively, it is ‌not sustainable and not good for morale.

Closing Thoughts

While we all know that change is inevitable and should be embraced, there is no perfect system for dealing with unplanned work. A significant contributor to how we experience change is our relationships—our level of collaboration with the customers, stakeholders, and our teams is ultimately what will determine the outcomes of any project.

So, if you are in a situation where things aren’t going as expected, try to experiment with some techniques I shared and encourage the team to come up with new ideas as well.

And, if you need more advice or guidance from an Agile expert, download our white paper, Using Lean-Agile Principles to Execute Organizational Transformations, or explore our SAFe coaching and consulting solutions.

SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.

It is painful to watch how some enterprises treat the Scrum Master role like a commodity: Scrum Masters are all the same and easily exchangeable. A generic input and an expense to be reduced. They are often treated more as administrators and scribes than as critical enablers for delivering superior economic outcomes. As a result, the Scrum Master role is often viewed as a dead-end with no growth opportunity.

The Commodity Attitude and Agility

This commodity attitude is tragic for the individual laboring under this mindset and economically limiting for the enterprise. This mindset robs the enterprise of the Scrum Master’s and one of Agile’s fundamental value propositions: superior economic outcomes through our way of working.

The Agile Manifesto’s first declaration, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, calls out the dramatic influence our ways of working together have on outcomes.

From study after study—from Scottish coal miners in the 1950s to NUMMI, the joint Toyota-GM venture in the 1980s, and even on nuclear submarines—we have learned that a key determinant to successful outcomes is how people work together.

This is Why I Am in This Crazy Agile Coaching/Mentoring Business

Years ago, I believed that to deliver great products, you just assembled raw engineering talent and then got out of the way. My eyes would roll up whenever our leadership talked about methodology and practices.

I could not have been more wrong.

After quite a few hard lessons and some mentoring from the CEO of an amazing startup—Ken Spencer of Creo Products—I learned firsthand how people work together is an outsized driver of economic outcomes. Alistair Cockburn succinctly summed this up in his quip “People trump process.”

Agile as a Competitive Advantage

In most Agile frameworks, the Scrum Master role is primarily concerned with the team’s way of working. When we treat our Scrum Masters as commodities—interchangeable and as a cost to be reduced—we are demonstrating that we do not regard our way of working as a competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, commodity cultures struggle with sensing and responding to opportunities and threats in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Commodity cultures find it hard to exploit change for economic benefit.

So, if we believe our way of working is a competitive advantage, then how do we de-commodify the Scrum Master role and acknowledge the value this role brings?

Six Guidelines for De-Commodifying the Scrum Master

Here are six guidelines for de-commodifying the Scrum Master role and turning it into a contributor to Agile success:

1. Understanding What the Scrum Master’s Role IS NOT

First, let’s be perfectly clear, the Scrum Master is not an administrator putting meetings on people’s calendars. They are not a scribe taking notes from those meetings to present to a project manager. And most certainly, they are not a project manager assigning and dictating tasks to the team.

2. Understanding What the Scrum Master’s Role IS

Their job is helping the team be a team and not a group of people who happen to work together. Their job is to help them discover their greatness as a team. Yes, I know this sounds fuzzy, but after being in this industry for nearly 40 years, I have discovered one truth: the fuzzy stuff drives economic outcomes.

Orgs must acknowledge that the Scrum Master role is primarily a coaching role. In fact, I like to say their job is to put me (an Agile coach) out of a job. Coaching is an intimate relationship with a team and is very much influenced by personality types. An individual who is a rock star with one team could fall flat with another. A team should be able to interview their Scrum Master, even if it is a team member who is being considered for the role.

3. Position the Scrum Master Role as an Opportunity for Advancement

Third, the Scrum master role must be seen as an opportunity to advance one’s career by developing strong facilitation and coaching skills. These are essential skills for anyone seeking a leadership role in an enterprise regardless of whether they see themselves as a manager or a senior engineer. Leaders must learn it’s not about making themselves appear great but about making others great.

The Scrum Master role is an excellent gateway to developing those skills. Contract Scrum Masters bring valuable new skills into the enterprise and can help start an organization on their Agile journey by mentoring and coaching internal Scrum Masters. However, to truly grow an agile organization, the Scrum Master role should be performed by someone who desires to grow their career with the enterprise.

4. Acknowledge That the Scrum Master is Not Always a Full-Time Role

Fourth, the Scrum Master role should not be a full-time job description.

A newly formed team may need full-time coaching to help them speed up their journey through the Tuckman curve (forming, storming, norming, and performing). However, as the team begins to function as a team, the direct coaching demands of the Scrum Master will diminish.

Personally, I prefer an appropriate team member who has leadership aspirations to receive 50% release time from their regular responsibilities to fulfill this role. Other enterprises may have a Scrum Master facilitate multiple teams.

5. Delegate the Running of the Team to the Scrum Master and Their Team

Fifth, delegate ownership of the team’s way of working to the Scrum Masters and their team.

Far too many enterprises are obsessed with “maturity,” which is often code for rigid compliance to some centrally defined framework or methodology. This compliance mindset impedes relentless improvement. Agile is about sensing and responding to change, and the way of working must also sense and respond to change. Practices introduced by Agile frameworks are a good starting point but were never intended to be a methodological straight jacket. After all, why do we have retrospectives if not to improve our way of working?

A discipline of “improvement experiments” can serve as an important guardrail on the evolution of the teams’ way of working. Most importantly, when the team owns their way of working, they will need time and space to focus collectively on improving their way of working. It’s not going to happen “after hours”.

6. Set Up a Support System for the Scrum Master

Finally, don’t let the Scrum Masters stand alone. Set up a supporting ecosystem for the Scrum Masters to share, learn, and improve together.

Do this by establishing a Scrum Master community of practices (CoP). The CoP becomes the focal point for mutual support and collectively driving improvement. During practice meetings, Scrum Masters can seek advice and share their experiences. A simple mantra we have for the Scrum Master CoP is, “we’ve got your back!” Through the CoP, Scrum Masters can drive improvement by sharing the results of improvement stories and deciding on improvement stories to add to their respective backlogs.

How an enterprise treats its Scrum Masters is a barometer of the value it places on its way of working.

• Are the Scrum Masters seen as valuable drivers and contributors to relentlessly improving outcomes, or are they seen as just another commodity and all the same and interchangeable?
• Do they foster team growth or is their job to perform administrative and reporting tasks for the team?
• Is their role to actively drive process improvement or to enforce compliance with fossilized standard operating procedures and practices?

How we answer these questions is the difference between “doing Agile” and being agile.

The concept of “Agile” has been tied to software development mainly because of the 2001 publication, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (a.k.a. the “Agile Manifesto”) which popularized this idea. Written by a group of software professionals, this artifact helped many teams apply a new way of working, which arguably revolutionized the way software applications are designed and delivered.

What is not commonly known is that the philosophy and values behind this Manifesto originated decades ago from manufacturing; Toyota Motors was the very first organization that conceived values such as short feedback loops, optimize flow of work, limiting work-in-progress, etc. This also means that the concepts and practices of Agile can be applied to almost any type of work that you do – from recruiting to marketing to business development, Agile practices can accelerate the delivery of nearly any product or service.

This sounds too good to be true, correct? Let’s take a closer look at a few examples of how Agile techniques can be applied to non-software projects.

Agile is NOT just for software?!

In my experience working with Agile teams over the past few years, I discovered a trend that is somewhat surprising – many people believe that “Agile” is synonymous to “Scrum”, which is not the case. This misconception has often led to the belief that if you want to “do Agile”, you must “do Scrum”, or apply Scrum-like practices. This is simply not the case. It is very possible to apply Agile principles and practices without adhering to the guidelines offered by the Scrum framework. Why does this matter, you may wonder. This is an interesting take on the Agile approach because you can apply Agile practices without practicing all of the events that Scrum requires, which means that Agile is potentially much simpler than you imagined!

How to apply Agile techniques even if you are not developing software

Here are a few practices (and questions) to consider when you are working on a non-software/non-technical project:

Start with what you do now

There is no need to abandon everything you do today for the sake of “doing Agile”. It is entirely possible (and likely) that many of the processes and/or tools that you are using today provide value and are quite effective, even if you have a desire to improve what you do now. It is absolutely okay to keep many of the tools and procedures that are already in place. The trick is to explore what makes sense to change. More on that shortly.

Consider where your pain-points are

What is keeping you or your team up at night? Where are the inefficiencies? What do your customers complain about the most? These are all questions that could lead to interesting insights if you dig a little deeper and spend some time to assess the root cause. These repetitive issues will likely provide you with a great starting point to apply Agile methods. A few examples are: long feedback cycles, lack of visibility into state of tasks and/or projects, quality issues, scope/requirements creep, etc.

What work can you complete in a short period of time?

Looking at the work your team is doing, how can you break down the work into smaller units? This may take a bit of experimentation, but if you can deconstruct work into less complex pieces, you could improve your ability to deliver a working solution more quickly, thus giving your customer an earlier view and the opportunity to provide feedback.

How often does your team reflect on how they collaborate?

When was the last time they thought about how to improve their processes and/or tools? Agile way of working is inherently iterative in nature, which means there should be natural checkpoints for the team to inspect their way of working and make adjustments as needed. The mindset of continuous improvement is not always easy for teams to adopt, but it will provide benefits once the team can establish a healthy routine of regularly reviewing how they work together.

How much work is your team trying to do at the same time?

Multi-tasking is a big “no no” in Agile because it takes away focus and erodes customer confidence when you start a lot of work but finish very little. Limiting your “WIP”, or Work In Progress, is one of the key tenets of Agile that is often forgotten. Reducing your WIP sounds easy enough to do, but it is often quite difficult for most of us who are accustomed to doing so, and it will require practice and persistence.

How often do you showcase your work to the customer?

Providing visibility and being transparent about successes and failures is not always easy, especially if you have a demanding customer who is used to getting what they ask for. A key tenet of Agile is close collaboration with the customer, which means partnering with them and being open and honest about everything. Again, not always easy to do, but it will build trust and confidence over time if you can work with the initial challenges.

Conclusion

In closing, you may have noticed that in this article, I did not suggest any technical practices that are specifically related to any Agile framework. While some of these ideas may feel a bit vague and general, I am hoping that you can find a real-world project with which you can try some of these techniques. You can see that none of these approaches are specifically intended for software projects, which means they can be applied to just about any type of project that you are working on. My final recommendation: choose a project that is not too small but not mission-critical so that you can apply one or two of these methods as an experiment. If you can make a commitment to giving this a try, I guarantee that you will learn something unexpected.