Allrounders is a team of 9 persons supporting some of the important applications in the organization. They were using Kanban so far and are doing well as a team. Anil, their Scrum Master is efficient and is helping the team focus on improving cycle time etc. Last month one of the applications they were supporting was phased out and the team was asked to work on couple of important initiatives that the organization is focusing on for the current year. Team members are not very experienced in handling development work and are looking forward to Anil for help. Anil himself has not handled a team doing this kind of work and is discussing with the team how to proceed etc. Can you help Anil with some possible approaches?
Suggested Solution
Anil will have to first find out what how much of teams’ capacity is available after the phasing out of one of the applications. Based on that he can plan how much work can be taken for the new initiatives. Possible steps which Anil can take are:
1. Observe the cycle time and throughput and determine roughly how much capacity team has to work on initiatives.
2. Understand the stories defined for the new initiatives and plan the release.
3. If the support work has significantly reduced, team can probably adopt the Scrum model and accommodate support work by allocating certain percentage of team’s capacity.
4. If the support work has not reduced much, continue with Kanban and try to slice the stories defined for the initiatives into smaller chunks and aim to deliver few stories in each iteration.
5. Observe the variations and challenges for couple of iterations and adjust as needed.
2 Responses
Velocity of each individual iteration will be a different figure. There are many ways velocity gets impacted. Apart from planned absence (planned leave, training etc.) and holidays, there could be unplanned absences caused by illness, personal emergency etc. which impact velocity. User stories that do not get completed in an iteration get moved to next iteration. This brings down the velocity of the iteration where the story was started and bumps up the velocity of the iteration where it got completed. This being the situation, good practice is to take an average of last five or six iterations as the velocity of the team. Team stability is another factor that impacts velocity. Teams that have higher churn will see higher volatility in velocity. Other factors such as change in technology, adoption of new tools, increase in automation, will also impact velocity either positively or negatively! However, if team is stable and has reached “performing stage” steady rise in average velocity will be seen over a period of time till any of the factors mentioned above comes into play and impacts it.
Thanks Milind, fully agree with your comment.
Finally, irrespective of the increasing trend in velocity, there is improvement for sure. This cannot be missed, if observed. One of the intent of my blog is to encourage this observation, by taking a mildly provocative stand.