Sustainable Pace

How To Do Effective Capacity Planning on The Scrum Team

During sprint planning, scrum teams often face this challenge of sprint commitments. How many stories can we commit in this sprint? How to plan for the team capacity?

I ask teams to do commitment driven planning during early stages of scrum adoption. For you to commit to a sprint goal, you need to know current team capacity. Team capacity is calculated as per people availability in that sprint.

Let’s take an example.

Scrum Teams: Slow Down, to Go Fast Later

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Being two months away from my passion – agile coaching, I was exploring my other interests like un-schooling my kid, learning by traveling, and spent time experiencing natural birth. I was wondering if I should share this experience on this blog which is focussed only on Agile. But being agile is about doing different experiments and never stopping, hence I thought its worthwhile to mention it here.

It was great spiritual learning for me to prepare and experience natural(spiritual) birthing. It really taught us how different is our body than we actually perceive. To trust our own body instincts to take its own course of action rather than relying on systems(hospitals) which was built to address emergency scenarios and not normal or natural phenomenon like birthing.

This decision to slow down or cutting myself completely helped me to understands different facets of me. Slowing down helped me reassess my priorities and how I need to take my life forward. My schooling system has taught me how to make a living, NOT a life! Pity.

I was recently connecting with few teams and I saw teams “racing to the goal post” with NO goals scored often. Seeing such teams I feel we are used to speed in every aspect of life. Not sparing a thought to slow down to see how are we doing? And, even if we do that, we’re unable to bring any noticeable changes.

Sustainable Pace: Does Culture Play Any Role At All ?

by Avienaash Shiralige 11 Comments

Striving to bring agility into the organisation to adapt to changing business conditions is leading people to lose sleep and stretch more than before in some organisations. Agile thought leaders definitely envisioned this and hence recognised sustainability as one of the agile principles.

[pullquote] Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. [/pullquote]

To run a long distance you need to find a sustainable pace. But often, companies just don’t get this due to various reasons like:

Pressure from business and management to get most work from least people
Team not having an option to make their own decisions – command and control culture
Teams inability to say NO for non-realistic goals. Service industry firms – they just can’t say NO to unreasonable client demands
Utilisation of people – Planning for 100% utilisation. This makes people work for more than required hours and hence getting burnout
Unable to remove distractions to the team. Lot of unplanned, non-essential meetings taking people’s time. Questioning motives and saying NO is essential here.
Allocating people on multiple projects with allocation distributed 20%,50%,30% etc. This does not work in reality. There is a switching time between two tasks and people take around 15 mins to achieve FLOW (high productive zone)