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You are coaching an eight-member team in Pune, part of a large multinational in the tech sector. The team is self-sufficient with the Product Owner & Product Management also being located in Pune. The team is now facing a tool-related challenge. A new tool has been introduced globally for logging customer-reported issues – shared with all customers world-wide and other internal stakeholders. The team has been using a home-grown tool all this while which now has to co-exist with the new tool during a transitionary period. The team has developed a script to manage the data exchange to and from the new tool but gets into issues from time to time due to surprise updates made by the tool provider, resulting in unplanned investigation and implementing script changes. Effort is wasted several times during the release cycle. The global rollout team interfacing with the tool provider say they have no time to address such issues for a home-grown tool on its way out.
The team is obviously unhappy with the situation and asks you for help. The manager of the team (also the person you are accountable to as the coach) tells you that the team has to accept this as just another constraint; like the project budget, he adds.
What would your next steps be? Would the coaching Values – Principles – Practices framework covered in the blog be of use for you? You can perhaps think of your own “solution” for the situation and then attempt the three questions in the quiz below.
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.