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Optimizing a SAFe Scrum Team |
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In my recent job I took over leadership of a SAFe scrum team that was not performing up to its expected level. Senior management had expressed its concerns with the team to me, on both an organizational as well as his personal level. He really wanted to know what the issue was behind the team’s underperformance, as well as wanted it resolved. The team was simply not completing committed objectives on time. In the high pressure development situation that we were in, there was no time for pulling people away from their development and testing duties to interview them to deduce the whys of this. (This was in the trail of a significant administration and personnel change. Morale was quite low.) However, Jira contains velocity charts for SAFe. These bar charts pair two bars for each completed iteration, one for the delivered story points next to one for the committed story points. When I started with the team, the delivered points were typically -70% to -80% of the committed points for each iteration. For example, if the team had committed to 60 story points for an iteration, they actually delivered in the nature of 15 points. |
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Using this as a baseline, I hypothesized that I could improve this by introducing good estimation skills and individual leadership. My goal was to decrease the delivered/committed variance to +/-15%. The following were the key points of my approach:
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The end result was that this optimized the work delivered/committed variance from -70% to +/- 10%. (Indicated in the Jira velocity charts.) It took the better part of a Program Increment to do so, but it remained fairly consistent once hit. That delivered points fluctuated within -10% to +10% of the committed points was better than I anticipated. With this the team started to consistently hit its commitments, and it was also pointed out to me that the team’s collective stress level went down noticeably. This made it a ka-ching in my book as both the senior management as well as customer leadership appreciated it. If you have any questions about this, or the nuances of it, please reach out to me. |
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. . . Steven Kury, MBA, is a software product manager. Throughout his career he has contributed vision and leadership to a breadth of online applications. Contact him at steve@steve-kury.biz or (717) 350-6781 to discuss how he could contribute to your system. |