Hi All,
I would be thankful to understand on how one should guide an agile team who started 10 months back on estimation. They are currently doing estimates in days and it seems to be working fine for them. Only problem is that team members are fully loaded and have no time for innovation. Appreciate your help. Regards, Lopa
My recommendation is to change your approach altogether.
Instead, count throughput. How many stories does your team get done in a week? Use that metric to forecast.
Your team will save tons of time and a lot of psychological tax. There is a lot of pressure to get the estimate ‘right’ and that has a cost.
Then, in order to feel like the variation is under control, try to break down the work into smaller chunks. Try to get stories down to a gut check of 1-3 days. But don’t fret whether they are accurate or not. Eventually they will be so used to making stories small, you won’t have to discuss how to make them into 1-3 day stories.
This isn’t innovation. It’s removing waste.
As I understood with estimations and forecast everything is fine. The problem is they don’t have a slack for improvements and innovations. First of all who should provide that slack in sprints in your organization? Product Owner? Team itself? Stakeholders? And depends on that use different language/approach to “sell” why team needs that slack for improvement.
Additional idea: organize Hackathon or Code Dojo, where you coudl focus on solving problems or improving current solutions.
