Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

A rather lively debate has been taking place within IndigoBlue regarding the validity of reporting optimistic velocity (i.e. not 100% complete and tested). I thought it might be interesting to share...

Focusing the team on completion is a fundamental requirement but it is often hard. However, introducing any form of "interim" completeness is counter-productive. The difficulty is that if you apply rigorous criteria to accruing velocity there is a likelihood that the velocity counted is low compared with the actual amount of work done. As an extreme example if there are no testing resources available during a sprint, at the end of that sprint the velocity is zero. Even in less extreme cases there is always going to be some work in-progress at the end of a sprint.

This low velocity has to be fed back to three sets of people:

1. The team - "You have worked very hard but we have collectively achieved nothing".
2. The governance - "We have spent £50k and so far we have achieved nothing."
3. The management team - to forecast against commitments: "We have achieved nothing after 3 sprints, so our extrapolation is that we will have achieved nothing after 30 sprints."

Resolving the problem of too much incomplete work requires two lines of attack: fixing the behaviour; or reporting something more realistic. The second part can drive PMs to start "making up" up a velocity, or subconsciously relaxing the completion criteria, on the basis that reporting the real velocity is "unacceptable" (or at least mis-communicative). Our thinking was that it is better to report a velocity BAND which retains "factual" information (i.e. partially complete) and maintains the rigorous velocity measure, rather than allow the definition of completion to be diluted.

By reporting a band you can also perform governance on whether the width of the band is increasing. This can be seen as a governance-level metric for how successfully batches are being closed. A win-win situation?