Agile Notes (No. 24)

Agile is all about incremental improvement. How do we measure improvement? Over the next few Agile Notes, I will to focus on Measuring Performance. Lets start with Capacity Planning.

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The snapshot above is a from a real team I worked with recently. Can you spot all the challenges? We worked in two-week Sprints. Each team member committed to 1 point of work per day. (This team also supported day to day operations of the business in addition to project/devops work.) We added team members at Sprint 19 and gave them some ramp time.

As you can see, we were consistently planning MORE than Capacity. In future editions, I will show what we Completed and also get into Variance.

Points Added reflects tasks/stories that were ADDED to the Sprint AFTER Sprint Planning. This was a team being called on for various trouble-shooting functions. We started tracking these Points Added in order to help us adjust our Capacity planning. Was planning 1 point of work per day too much? Too little?

Next time, we will look at the work Completed during each Sprint. We need to measure the Reality of what the team is Planning and Ultimately delivering. And in the case of this example, we need to measure the impact of the work coming in sideways or outside the Sprint Planning Process.

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