I once made a statement about closing out project management tickets that went something like “The actual hours a story / task took are the only metrics that matter”. At the time, we had a ton hoops to jump through to close a story out due to our tooling choices. We ignored most of them, but the actual hours field was something I told the team I valued. My thinking at the time was this would definitively show us if we’re coming up with accurate estimates and if we missed our estimates, where did we spend that time. This would give us solid data points to use across sprints and act as a spring board for future planning sessions. In reality it ends up being fruitless and does little to build a better team.
I generally follow Scrum when leading agile teams, but I’m not prescriptive about it in any way. “Whatever works for the team” is another sound byte you’ll routinely hear me say and along those lines is where I had my epiphany. Just like being agile is about enabling the team, estimation and time in Scrum is all about the sprint. “How many stories can get done this sprint” is the real question around how long something will take. That’s it. It’s a scheduling exercise to maximize effective use of fixed time. It’s just an estimate! Where that time went during the story / task completion is immaterial for planning. Sure, it makes for a good conversation during the retrospective and leads to a fancy spreadsheet some dude in khakis can email around, but tracking actual hours in Scrum does little improve the estimation process of the team and certainly doesn’t increase the teams productivity. If neither of those things are happening as a result of tracking actuals, then I submit it is a pointless venture.
Tag: agile
Being agile or using Scrum does not mean sitting in the same room
I had a troubling conversation about Agile with project manager that is transitioning into a “Scrum master” role. I used the noun version of agile since I live in the corporate world and if we cannot fit it into a box, it’s not enterprise ready. What made me pause was his immediate reaction to impose his understanding and view of Agile on an existing and copasetic team.
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