Not My People (Work Shit)
We do this thing where at the end of every two week development iteration where we throw up some slides for each team - how much did you commit to doing, and how close did you come to meeting that target? To quantify things, we look at commitment versus fulfillment in terms of user stories and total story points for each team, each iteration. As with many many teams, there's almost always a gap between what the teams planned to complete and what they were able to complete.
For a while now, I've thought that this might actually not be a good thing to do - it's the one measurable indicator of how well the teams are doing, but doesn't actually tell us anything about whether the work was useful, valuable, blah blah blah. But because it's the one metric we use to evaluate ourselves, people do all sorts of sneaky stuff to boost the number of completed stories or points ("This'll be done by the end of the first day of the next sprint so let's call it done!" "Let's call this story done and create a new story for next sprint to track the remaining work. That story will be ANOTHER 20 points of effort.") Mostly when people do that stuff it just annoys me because it's generally a self-deceptive waste of time, but if I want the teams to knock it off, I should really stop incentivizing that kind of behavior by acknowledging teams when they complete a lot of story points or carry over fewer stories. Basically, I, and the rest of the leadership group, am encouraging teams to juke the stats to make themselves look good according to the measurement I've been using.
So I've been trying to introduce other ways to recognize good work, and convince the rest of the manager-types that we should knock it off with the metrics, or at least switch to metrics that better reflect what we're trying to do, like a release burndown* chart. I've talked about it with individual team members too, and every time we have the conversation, I start off by saying "Have you seen 'The Wire'?" so I can skip the complicated explanations and just say "We're juking the stats, and that's stupid." I've had this conversation five times now. Only one guy had even heard of the show.
* To do this, of course, we'd need to know what any given release consists of, which: LOLOLOL.
For a while now, I've thought that this might actually not be a good thing to do - it's the one measurable indicator of how well the teams are doing, but doesn't actually tell us anything about whether the work was useful, valuable, blah blah blah. But because it's the one metric we use to evaluate ourselves, people do all sorts of sneaky stuff to boost the number of completed stories or points ("This'll be done by the end of the first day of the next sprint so let's call it done!" "Let's call this story done and create a new story for next sprint to track the remaining work. That story will be ANOTHER 20 points of effort.") Mostly when people do that stuff it just annoys me because it's generally a self-deceptive waste of time, but if I want the teams to knock it off, I should really stop incentivizing that kind of behavior by acknowledging teams when they complete a lot of story points or carry over fewer stories. Basically, I, and the rest of the leadership group, am encouraging teams to juke the stats to make themselves look good according to the measurement I've been using.
So I've been trying to introduce other ways to recognize good work, and convince the rest of the manager-types that we should knock it off with the metrics, or at least switch to metrics that better reflect what we're trying to do, like a release burndown* chart. I've talked about it with individual team members too, and every time we have the conversation, I start off by saying "Have you seen 'The Wire'?" so I can skip the complicated explanations and just say "We're juking the stats, and that's stupid." I've had this conversation five times now. Only one guy had even heard of the show.
* To do this, of course, we'd need to know what any given release consists of, which: LOLOLOL.