Karan is the Delivery lead for the DevOps team tasked towards automating the pipeline for the entire Data lake teams that are working in the back office services including reconciliation, net asset value and other important indicators for the enterprise. This team is also working on creating standards for clean code within the units.
The team has recently migrated to a two week sprint. They have had many unplanned work come in from the teams such as jobs that are failing, builds that are taking longer than expected. Karan along with the scrum master Mantra had requested all the scrum masters to provide a heads up on their upcoming work. This would help them to get support effectively. More often than not, the team ends up being in the receiving end of the “urgent” and “important” tagged requests. Karan has observed that while keeping up with the spirit of agile and scrum, there is more than 30% of scope change leading to planning becoming quickly redundant or wasteful.
What would you do if you are in Karan’s shoes?
Solution
Karan took the following steps that helped him towards the right direction
A. Karan created a high level initiatives that are expected from the DevOps team for the year
B. He garnered understanding and acceptance for the initiatives from the team
C. Mantra and Karan joined up in creating a prioritised set of goals that can be completed each quarter.
D. They created this visibility with an understanding that only 40% of their capacity can go for such planned work
E. Mantra suggested to use ScrumBan to manage the work and visualise. They used scrum for planned work and rest of the stories to flow in based on service or incidents requests.
This multi step process created lot of clarity for Karan on the team’s progress. The devops team was on board with the direction. Mantra was impressed that Karan helped and provided room for her to bring the changes to the team.
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.