Scrumboard Velocity Management
How to reach predictability
Predictability is what your customer value the most
Sustainable pace is what your team value the most.
Good news: they both rely on finding the correct tempo.
How? Look at Scrumboard velocity management
See how velocity management helps to predictability in this video
How does it work?
1 Run a Sprint
By default the sizing is expressed in ideal days in Scrumboard and team velocity is 100%. So if you are 7 team members working on 3 weeks sprints, you can cope with 105 ideal days.
2 Update the team velocity factor
At the end of the first sprint, typically during the retrospective, checkout how well you perform compared to what was planned and adapt the team velocity factor accordingly in the configuration.
Alternatively, you can alter the way sizings are done. Both ways are OK, yet team velocity change is more intuitive than to try to alter how the team does its estimations.
3 Iterate and converge
Continue to reassess your real velocity and fine tune team velocity factor
4 Cope with team changes
While it is a good idea to keep the team as it is in the long run to benefit from its converged predictability, life happens.
People move for many reasons.
An arrival or a departure in the team alters right away the team velocity: we apply the current team velocity factor to the new resource level.
5 Cope with part time
Scrum asks for full time team members, and yes you should do it as much as possible.
Yet again, life happens and we know that in real life, it can occur.
To cope with it, you may not wait for a sprint or two to realign team velocity, so you can use availability (in team member edition) to reflect this.