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This week I’m loving
Last week I spent a few minutes in the seminar I was teaching to discuss the double-edged sword of agile project management known as velocity. This is a topic I can be known to get passionate about.
So this week I’m loving a great blog post by Stefan Wolpers on the Illusion of Velocity.
One thing I love about Stefan’s work is his illustrations. I’m sure you’ve all encountered organizations where this is representative:
Image credit: Stefan Wolpers
What prompts organizations to become obsessed with velocity? In my experience it happens in a variety of ways including:
Velocity was shared outside the team at some point and we got excited about something we could measure
The team isn’t delivering value so the desire for answers leads to proxy evidence of accomplishments such as numbers of tickets completed and velocity
The management team desires reporting which is evaluated using traditional management lenses
Really these desires are all fueled by the same root causes, a mindset oriented toward traditional command and control leadership where execution is predictable and supported by abundant data.
However, this ignores the key fundamental that agile practices exist for: situations involving complexity. By nature, complexity introduces uncertainty. Uncertain environments are unpredictable. Unpredictable environments are unruly; and we must respond to them instead of control them.
Stefan further points out:
Classical management prioritizes output — the amount of work done — over the outcome, the actual value delivered. This focus often leads to a misguided effort to increase the velocity or speed of delivery without considering whether the work is effective or even necessary. In complex environments, the focus needs to shift to learning what works quickly and adapting based on feedback rather than just doing more of the same faster.
Beware the double-edged sword:
Velocity is typically measured using story points. However, story points are exponential and relative. This means, story points don’t really mean much outside the team, and therefore interpreting velocity by outside stakeholders is virtually impossible.
Many project managers desire to use velocity to predict the team’s ability to execute future work. (Scrum sadly, even suggests this). Don’t be tempted by this! Remember a relative scale might change from sprint to sprint, and using velocity to predict the future assumes a stable environment when we clearly do not have one if we understand the nature of complexity.
Wondering what you can do instead? Stefan suggests using Flow Metrics.
Lead time - the time a work item takes from initiation to completion
Cycle time - the time the software development team takes to handle the work item
Throughput - the number of work items finished in a specified time frame
Flow efficiency - the ratio of total time worked as a percentage of lead time. This metric indicates the amount of idle time in the flow.
Switching to flow metrics requires a mindset shift from output to outcome, from task completion to value realization. This shift allows management to understand the team’s effective capabilities, adjust expectations, and ultimately align business goals with agile practices for a more responsive and resilient organization.
Tool of the week
Since velocity is the hot topic of the hour I set out to find an awesome tool I could recommed that would help you track flow metrics instead. Velocity comes out of the box in almost every agile project management tool despite its pitfalls.
Sadly, there isn’t a lot of great news. While Jira Align promotes a suite focused on Flow Metrics, the metrics tracked aren’t super aligned with best practice. Jira remains the software most attached to velocity and sprint burndowns.
But there was a glimmer - and this hope came from Trello. The good news is that Trello is advantageous to teams that want to conduct themselves using a Kanban visualization but are interested in more than just dragging cards to “Done”.
Enter, Trello Power-Up “Nave”. I haven’t used this tool personally but it is the only one I have found that really properly handles the Flow Metrics we described above. Bonus, it does this very elegantly.
Image credit: Trello Power-Up description page for Nave
Using the Nave Power Up you can design dashboards that are meaningful to your team with the flow metrics that matter to your organization. Graphics are rich and metrics can be clearly highlighted.
Get an easy step-by-step guide here and start today!
An interesting read
Today’s interesting read comes again from Roger L. Martin and focuses on a key awareness generalist project managers should have in every organization they work with: how the leadership team works.
Why is this important? Quite simply, generalist project managers are likely to be working high up in their organization (with executive sponsors) and be working on complex projects that require frequent interaction with the leadership team and which usually are delivering highly valuable (a.k.a strategic outcomes).
What I loved about this read is that Roger lays out a simple framework for evaluating the dynamics of your leadership team, no matter what organization you are within.
The premise is that leadership teams have 3 fundamental ways of working:
Image credit: Roger L. Martin blog
This simple construct gives us the fabulous ability to help influence the effectiveness of the leadership by observing the presence or absence of three key factors:
Role clarity
Collaboration
Issue resolution approach
Role clarity is essential for working as Individuals. This is because it fosters decision independence which in turn allows decision-making clarity. Everyone knows whose decision it is to make and that person can make the required decision swiftly.
The presence or absence of collaboration helps us understand the ability of the leadership team to work together and the presence of the required skills to be successful at this. Working as Colleagues is a necessity to navigate matrixed operation and navigating tensions within the matrix. This is a critical component to successful project execution which relies on cross-functional teams and the delivery of value through operations across the matrix.
Finally, issue resolution within the leadership team needs to be focused on issues that no one else can resolve and this results in three key behaviors: issue identification; action on identified issues; and successful resolution of these issues. This is the reason for operating as a Collective, the final working mode of the framework.
Have you experienced challenges with a leadership team? I’ll be curious to hear if this model seems like it would have helped.
A tip
A lesson
Today’s lesson comes from the very wise strategy guru Alex M. H. Smith (seriously if strategy interests you at all - follow him here).
Alex has a wonderful ability to boil things down into the clearest essence you will ever come across from someone who consults on strategy for a living.
Alex’s Twitter post that this lesson is from does exactly this.
Every great brand, every bold move, every radical strategy, they all started the same way:
— With someone stating their opinion on what matters —
Wait…you say…isn’t strategy based on facts?
We're taught that facts are king:
• That they're reliable.
• Objective.
• Valuable.
• True.
And we're also taught that opinions are the opposite:
• That they're misleading.
• Subjective.
• Cheap.
• Even false.
But, perhaps opinions should be viewed differently.
Opinions aren't the "opposite" of facts, the way people seem to think they are. On the contrary, opinions are about how facts *interrelate*. They're about the space between the facts. The meaning of the facts. The effects of the facts. Facts without opinions are dull, lifeless, abstracted things. It is opinions that breathe life into them, and that reveal the relevance they have to the real world.
And the lesson is:
Therefore, one of the greatest sins you can commit as a leader is to create an atmosphere where opinions aren't respected or encouraged. You should be collecting them and treasuring them. For they are the petri dish where insight is grown.
Thanks for reading today’s newsletter! Just a reminder, I’d love to hear if you might be interested in the establishment of a community of practice for generalist project managers. Leave me a comment, or DM me on Twitter or LinkedIn to let me know! If you aren’t sure what this is about, read about it here.