The Story Points Detox Plan Shortcut

Reader Mary shared an inspiring story of introducing modern flow metrics in parallel to classic agile metrics, such as Velocity, to improve flow on her team.

If you haven’t guessed so far, introducing Flow is one of my favorite patterns for moving from mindless mechanical agile (Agile Theater) towards intent-driven principle-aware agility. There’s something about working on Flow that is magical in how it wakes you up to the principles whether it’s at the personal, team, or portfolio level.

Introducing flow metrics is a great way to do that. Visualizing the work using a Kanban board is another. But as Mary highlights, people can get hung up on their beloved Velocity…

Today’s post is an example of horrible flow. It was stuck deep in my drafts for 5 years. Not sure how that happened. But anyhow, here’s the story of the Story Points Detox Plan - a blast from 2019 (don’t you wish some days we were all back in 2019? )

The Story Points Detox Plan

So you’ve read about the #NoEstimates movement, and you’re thinking about trying flow metrics instead of velocity. What next? How do you convince your team and stakeholders to part away with their beloved velocity?

Well, Agile is all about Empiricism, right? So, your first step should be to run an experiment. Actually, No! You probably already ran the first experiment. You can consider previous Sprints your team planned and delivered using Story Points and Velocity as your dataset.

You probably have a chart along these lines that shows you your historical Velocity and helps the Scrum Team when planning the Sprint or Release. Using the same data, create a similar chart where the difference is in the Y-axis. Instead of showing the sum of Story Points-based Velocity for each Sprint, show a count of PBIs Done in each Sprint. 

Compare the shapes of those two charts. Is one of them more stable than the other? Do you feel more comfortable creating a forecast using one of them? Many teams find that the count-based chart is much more stable, and they feel more comfortable forecasting the number of items they’ll deliver in their next Sprint than the number of Story Points. Maybe that’s the case with your team, maybe not.

Looking at these two charts and having this discussion can be a great Retrospective activity with the Scrum Team if you want the team to consider experimenting with a new approach to planning. 

Are you using Flow Metrics in your team/organization? If so - what pattern did you use to introduce it? If not - which pattern will you use?

Where else can you apply this pattern? Where else do you already have some data/evidence that you can use to build confidence to try something different?