Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games?
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
“Hey, Jim, guess what? I incented my agile team to work faster and harder. I told them if they doubled their velocity, I would give them a team bonus. And it worked! In just one iteration, they went from 23 points to 46 points. Is that team a great team, or what?” – a not-so-agile project manager to another project manager
If there is a way to misunderstand the progress of a team, or if there is a way to game the system when it comes to estimates, someone will do it. That’s because there’s plenty of pressure to try to finish projects faster. Sometimes that pressure comes from outside the team, from our managers. When it does, the team can succumb to two common agile schedule games: “Double Your Velocity” and “Everyone Start Your Own Story.”
If you face these schedule games, you do have options and can manage them before they destroy your project.
Double Your Velocity
In “Double Your Velocity,” someone such as the not-so-agile project manager above misunderstands the velocity measurement that agile projects use. Let’s discuss what velocity is: Velocity is a way for teams to use historic information of this particular group of individuals who have worked together before, on this domain of work before, and to use that data to predict what they can do for this next iteration. Velocity is an …
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"Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule." - Samuel Butler |
