Book Draft Chapters Chapter 119 Review Draft - How do We Know We Are Getting Value? | Chapter 119 Review Draft - How do We Know We Are Getting Value? |
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| Saturday, 05 April 2008 | |
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Burndown charts are a great tool. They show, at a glance, both how much work has been accomplished in a sprint and how much work remains. What they don’t show, however, is how much time teams are spending on activities, such as meetings and reviews, that go on behind the scenes. This ambiguity leads to questions like, “What’s the team really working on?” “Is the team really maxed out?” and “Can the team take on more work?”In reality, the team probably is maxed out, working at their capacity. The question is, on what? Are they spending the right time on the right things? That’s the real issue here. Until they know how the team is spending their time, product owners, project managers or anyone else who is not a core team member likely will ask the team to produce more, to increase their velocity. The team will perceive this constant badgering by “people that don’t understand” as ignorance, and they will react negatively or lash out at their product owner. The perception that this reaction will create is that the team is defensive, not willing to take on more work; maybe the team is not working hard enough. What is missing is transparency. Once upon a time, the solution for providing that transparency was to use burndowns. And that was a pretty good answer—for a while. It turns out, though, that if you really want to measure value and keep a team working on value, you need more than that. By providing transparency and visibility into the work types the team is addressing, product owners and business can optimize for value. |
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