My friend and colleague and I were coaching at a client recently. We started to have a conversation around velocity, not directly driven by the clients’ context, but simply in general.

Shaun was focused on velocity as a relevant metric within agile teams to drive conversations between teams and upper management. And I was struggling to “get there”.

Part of his focus was to create visibility around the difference between average velocity and current sprint velocity. Furthermore, the teams and management would be able to see:

• Velocity gaining stability over time (predictability, low variance)
• And increasing over time (short term burst)

As part of newly formed and / or newly coached agile teams.

Now I really get what he was saying. And I agree that teams in these contexts should be displaying activity and behavior towards those two results.

However, my struggle was to make velocity a key metric. One that everyone laser focuses on.

If you could only have 3 KEY metrics…

In order to drive some depth into our discussion, I asked both of us to define our three key or crucial metrics. That is, if we could ONLY have three metrics to measure agile teams (and organizations), what would they be?

Here are our choices (and remember, these were driven over a lunch conversation, so not the deepest of thinking behind them):

Shaun Bradshaw

1. Sustainable pace (heartbeat, tempo, team health)
2. Collaborative flow (swarming, avoiding Scrummer-fall, 3-amigos)
3. Effective handling of interruptions (visibility, factoring into commitments/plans)

Bob Galen

1. Value delivered (demo reactions and measured usage)
2. Continuous improvement (everywhere, effective retrospectives)
3. Predictability (from a release / business forecasting perspective)

As you can see, velocity did not “make the cut” in our lists.

Sure, it underlies some of them, for example sustainable pace for Shaun and predictability for me. But if these are our critical, first order metrics, velocity isn’t one of them.

What do you think of our lists? Agree with us? Or Disagree and why? And what would your list look like?

What was I concerned about?

We ended our discussion agreeing that velocity could be a 2’nd Order metric.

Why? Because it’s fragile.

But probably the biggest reason I was pushing back on velocity with Shaun is that it can be misinterpreted and misused by leadership.

Feedback from Shaun:

I think this is where you and I had the biggest disagreement. It seems to me that you’d prefer not to show Velocity so it’s unlikely for the misinterpretation to occur. I think that’s fair, but I suspect that even if Velocity isn’t clearly identified management will question it. As a result, my preference is to, sort of call it out. Put it out there for everyone to see and invite the conversation about why it is what it is, is it “good” by the team’s standards. Basically, if we don’t openly share velocity it kind of feels like the team is trying to hide it.

I have little to no concern if Shaun is focusing on velocity as he coaches agile teams. That’s because he’s an experienced coach and he understands the nuance of velocity as “one of” a series of healthy agile metrics.

For example, he won’t overreact if velocity changes abruptly between two sprints. Or if a team seems to struggle gaining accuracy early on. Or if their current sprint plan is 10 points less than the last one; he will certainly not challenge their commitment and professionalism. And finally, he knows not to compare velocity across teams to draw any conclusions.

But in all of the above cases, “management” can often make these mistaken interpretations and many more. Which can lead to metrics dysfunction and the team showing less transparency and “gaming” their velocity.

More feedback:

I think this is the best argument against openly publishing or calling out Velocity, but maybe it just means, as a coach, you have to be aware of the organizational context before you recommend if/how you use Velocity. In some organizations you may never be able to over the potential dysfunction of misinterpretation, but in others creating the visibility of the metric could help dispel some of the dysfunction.

Wrapping Up

First, I want you to consider how important a light you want to focus on velocity as one of your metrics. Is it one of your “Top 3” or is it secondary to others?

In my discussion with Shaun, I wasn’t emphasizing “hiding” your velocity, just deemphasizing its importance and interpretation within your organization.

I challenge all of you to sit down and list your own Top 3 Crucial/Critical Agile Metrics. Ask yourself:

• Are they similar to our lists?
• What are the differences?
• What led to your picking those three?
• And most interesting, was velocity part of your list?

I also want to thank Shaun for forcing me to think more about metrics…

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

View the "Scrums of Scrums Video"