How to drop story points for Scrum teams in 10 steps:
You walk into a Sprint Planning meeting.
You ask the team if they want to drop story points and try something different.
They say: “Yes”.
Here’s how you can have the conversation to move you away from story points to a more effective & less time consuming approach to estimation.
Step 1: ” Hello team, how long does it normally take to get a piece of work from To Do to Done 85% of the time?”
“But how do I get to the 85%” - don’t worry about that for now, we’ll explain later.
If you have the data: proceed to Step 2:
If you don't have the data:
-Ask the team to use their old approach to estimation and run an experiment where we measure how long it takes to get work done so we can generate a scatter plot by the end of the sprint.
“But how do I generate a scatter plot ?”
You can join us this Thursday on our Mentoring Platform at 6:30 p.m., where you will learn how to build and interpret a scatter plot.
This is an invite only event, subscribe to our paid Substack to get your ticket!
When you subscribe to our paid Substack you gain access to our incredible Mentoring community where we as the experts help you gain real world skills to level up .
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Step 2: The team tell us that “the data shows that we can take from 1 - 20 days to get a piece of work done”.
Step 3: We then look at the product backlog, pull out a work item out and ask: “Do we think we can get this work done in 20 days or less?”.
Step 4: “No… it'll take longer” says the team. “Ok, so let’s break it down”. I reply. When the work is broken down, the team agree we can get that piece of work done in 20 days or less.
Step 5: So now the team have work 15 items in the sprint backlog and we ask “do we think this is enough”
Now since the team have never estimated in this way, of course we don’t know for sure! So we continue to the best of our judgement and add more PBIs into the Sprint Backlog until it feels like we have enough.
Step 6: We come to the of Sprint Planning and walk out with this head line:
“ We are going to take on 18 work items for this month's sprint where we have an 85% chance of getting this work done”.
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It’s very likely you have questions at this point…
“How does taking in work between 1- 20 days actually help us…isn’t that too big of a range?”
Yes it may be.
That’s where you turn your attention to the cycle time that you identify from the scatter plot you have built and explore the outliers and trends.
“But how do I build a scatter plot and how do I understand trends?”
Good questions.
You can join us this Thursday the 6th of March for 30 minutes (UK time 6:30pm) where you will learn how to build and interpret a scatter plot.
That’s the next step!
