How do you calculate velocity in scrum when you have outside stakeholders?

Agile Scrum Stakeholder Management

Alicia Pino Colorado Springs, Co, United States

I work for an ecommerce/publishing company. In the last few years, we have started to organizationally adapt agile. Our biggest issue with setting a project roadmap or predicting when our products can hit the market is our outside stakeholders. We have over 30+ contributors to our products that submit and review content. We have re-worked contracts to motivate them to turn their work in on time but it doesn't always work. We also have a ranking system to weed out and not work with the ones who submit poor quality work. We still have unpredictable release cycles and this is our major issue. I'm just not sure how to consider this in our velocity calculations.

Posted: Feb 10, 2020 6:42 PM

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Alicia Pino Colorado Springs, Co, United States

Feb 11, 2020 2:23 PM

Replying to Aaron Porter

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Velocity is a backward-looking measure that can be used for forward-looking estimating, but it's still an estimate. You are wanting to use the size of the total effort divided by the velocity to determine the number of sprints, hence when you can expect to release. You can establish your team's velocity based on the work they have performed. You can estimate the release based on the work they will perform. The variable is waiting for content from external sources.

Is this a fair assessment?

Do you have enough historical information to be able to estimate the expected delay(s) due to external dependencies? One approach might be to create a spike/story for expected delay. How you size this story would vary based on the length of the expected delay and the length of your sprints. I'm not saying this is the best way. The point is to plan for the delay - it's a risk that you need a mitigation plan for.

Does this make sense? Am I missing anything?

I really appreciate your clear break down and tactical approach. I'm going to take the spike/story to our production department lead and talk through it to see if it's a feasible solution.

We don't include our outside contributors into our velocity estimating but we have to somehow account for their time and delays.

Posted: Feb 11, 2020 2:49 PM

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How do you calculate velocity in scrum when you have outside stakeholders?

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