Don't make your engineering team commit

Many engineering teams have sprint commitments. You want accountability, right? So you have the team commit to what they’ll accomplish during the sprint.

Mostly, this is a terrible idea: commit based approaches trade slower velocity for higher predictability.

If you ask me what I’ll accomplish in a week, I do an internal calculation:

• Am I being asked for an estimate, or a commitment?
• If it’s a commitment, the penalty of overcommitting is much higher, so I will hedge.
• I’ll agree to do less, because I don’t want to be penalized for not meeting my commitment.

A better approach

A better approach is to reduce the cost of commitment. Make it safe to agree to do more.

You do that by setting clear goals, and focus all of our wonderful creativity on how to achieve those goals and learn how to be faster and better.

For sprints, I often will have someone on the team put together a draft goal for the week, and then have the team talk about whether they think that goal is a reasonable thing they can demo, and whether the goal should be bigger or smaller.

Emphasize that the sprint is about your best guess of what you can accomplish by the demo, and that it’s okay to not achieve that. This gives a clear thing to work towards, but also reduces the need to hedge.

Preconditions

You have to have psychological safety for this to work. And, importantly, you have to be able to introspect and have a culture where people are noticing when we can do better.

If you don’t have an environment that supports this type of safe, honest appraisal of the situation, then you may have to fall back on a commit based approach. Stick to sandbagging, carefully deciding what you can agree to, and making sure you look good.

There are times when predictability is more important than velocity. In those cases, definitely go for a commit based approach. But I think most teams should be focusing on operating in a high trust environment, setting clear goals, and introspecting and continuous improvement to deliver the most they can each week.

This is a general principal

This is bigger than just sprint commitments. This is a general aspect of human behavior. The more you increase the cost of something, the less you’ll get of it.

Thank you

Image by un-perfekt from Pixabay