The typical response to tough economic times is for IT leaders to make across-the-board cuts. While the cost savings are immediate, they are drastic, one-time fixes that introduce risk and don't position the organization for future survival.
Value-driven projects differ from plan-driven projects in significant ways, including how teams are formed, how funding is obtained, how scope is determined and how solutions are achieved. They seek valuable rather than predictable results. Here’s a roadmap to making the switch.
Velocity is an agile planning tool, not a measure of productivity. Its purpose is to help determine which stories will fit into a sprint, and how many sprints remain until a release is ready or the project is done. Velocity is not about team efficiency or effectiveness, and treating it as a metric to continually improve is another Agile Anti-Pattern.
There are many reasons why it isn't a good idea to “increase velocity” as a proxy to show the team is “doing more.” If your goal is to figure out how to improve efficiency, or simply increase the output of the team, then using the velocity metric isn’t the right way to go about it.
Though there is lot of bias toward increasing velocity every iteration to release more features faster, if there is no attention to quality, the system will soon become fragile—and will not be able to house scope changes in the future. How do we balance these forces?
With a hospital expansion project placed on hold due to the pandemic, the design team got it restarted by pivoting to a virtual design environment, implementing a virtual “big room” or collocation space, utilizing digital tools to streamline project workflow, and incorporating live and virtual models for real-time collaboration and decision-making.