Team productivity — SCRUM
With this post I want to explain the process I carry out to implement a metric and a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) in a development team in the company where I currently work.
All this is based on the practices of SCRUM in all its theory and applicability.
It is a mistake to try to measure processes in hours, where deliverables depend on people’s ability to think, they do not work at the same pace, at the same speed, they do not have the same knowledge and / or experience. One of the challenges for consolidating a mature team is learning to read each of the team members and identify how they will behave over a period of time.
The first thing I did was set up a team observation process, following the SCRUM methodology, I proposed that the tasks be measured by the effort it would take to perform it (following the poker technique and with the fibonacci series). The objective of this first stage was to learn how each member of the team would perform. Example: Pepito Perez said that the effort he estimated to perform task 1 was 5, but Juan Lopez estimated that the effort was 15.
After 2 months (8 weeks) of observations, you can have the data to make decisions about it. The result of the exercise for me is, each member of the team was able to have an effort of 21 points in one week (5 days). (it can be the equivalent of several tasks);
Another of the conclusions that helped me create the metric is that when it is agreed that the task has a weight of 21 it should be broken down into smaller tasks, in order to be able to monitor it more closely and how it is being carried out.
The important thing week by week is to refine with the help of the team the metrics, the weights (efforts), since each week that passes the team members learn, they are trained, which suggests that some tasks that are repeated can be done less effort.
