Focus on the work, not story points

Lesson learnt after the experiment is here

Are you familiar with situations below during your every sprint planning meeting,

• team is asked to estimate how many points are (in a Fibonacci-like format: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.) for every card/task
• team is told, based on the data in the last X number of sprints, that team can finish Y number of points in one sprint

You may be wondering why collecting and analyzing story points are necessary. I do not know why organisation needs it (I am not organisational level Agile coach), but from team’s perspective, one use case of those estimated story points is to help team decide whether there are more or less work to do than their capacity. In other words, team’s capacity per sprint is defined by story points.

However, as every one knows estimation is not accurate. Hence, it is hard for team to make commitment to sprint. The consequence is that, most of the time, we either carry stories/tasks over the next sprint or pull new stories/tasks in current sprint. Carrying stories/tasks to next sprint may cause cascading changes (i.e. delivery plan, impact on the dependencies, etc.), is not good to build trust with stakeholders and also makes team frustrated. To solve it, we may add buffer or overestimate but they are not ideal. Instead of using inaccurate/unreliable/inconsistent estimated story points to decide the team’s capacity per sprint, it can be defined by WIP limits (i.e. 1 must-have feature and 6 should-have features per sprint) + Pull model. Therefore, team always focus on the highest priority tasks that deliver most critical business values. The other benefits include team has more clear goals and same goals as business so that IT team and business team are more aligned.

In addition, from story points’ perspective, it is also impossible to tell which sprint performs better when one sprint finishes 100 story points and another completes 80. Rather than measuring by story points, team’s performance is measured by the completion of the work so that team focuses on getting work done and delivery.

Edit: One thing I observed is that using story points seems anti-trust and team may play games about it. This may lead team to add new cards with points if the work is not specified in the original cards but they are related to same problem (i.e solving a tech problem) to show they are working on things. At the end of day, it is about solving problems and getting things done rather than how many cards are created and how many points are spent.