Adding members to the Agile Team makes you go slower

Initially at least!

Velocity

When building a new AgileBI delivery team, it takes a while to achieve what is referred to as a full velocity.

Velocity is a metric used to measure the work done.  At the end of each delivery iteration, the AgileBI Team adds up effort estimates associated with user stories that were completed during that iteration. This total is called velocity.

Velocity is used in the planning process to help the AgileBI Team workout what they can commit to delivering in the next 3-week iteration.  They size each user story in the iteration using Poker Points and then “fill” the sprint with the user stories until the total number of points matches the velocity of the previous iteration.

It will take a new AgileBI Team 3 – 6 iterations to reach full velocity.  By full velocity, I mean the average number of points the team can sustainability and successfully, deliver in 3-weeks of effort.  AgileBI Teams will typically start out with a low velocity until they discover the most efficient way to work together and meet their full potential – aka full velocity.

It is important to note that the velocity of different AgileBI teams is always different and you should never compare across different teams.

Once the AgileBI Team has discovered its full velocity, the AgileBI team can also compute (or revise) an estimate of how long the project will take to complete, based on the estimates associated with remaining Information Product backlog and assuming that velocity over the remaining iterations will remain approximately the same. This is generally an accurate prediction.

Adding a new team member makes you slower

This often causes an issue when there is a fixed or desired deadline and the estimated date of completion is after the desired date of completion.  The Stakeholders often find this unacceptable.

If you have a well-formed AgileBI Team that is at their true maximum velocity then the only choices you have is to either accept the estimated date of completion, reduce what you are asking them to deliver or stand up an additional AgileBI Delivery Team.

Of course, standing up an additional team of 5 to 7 AgileBI Members is often a large cost, especially when it takes 9 to 18 weeks (3 to 6 iterations)  for them to achieve their full velocity.

So there is a big risk that somebody will come up with the idea of adding 1 or more new members to the current team.  If the team does not have good T-Skills, or you are pipelining, you will often see the suggestion that you double some of the legacy roles.  For example, adding another BA and Tester to make it “go faster”.

The issue is that adding new members to the AgileBI Team will make the whole team go slower and deliver less, at least in the short term.  This is because:

1. The existing AgileBI Teams members will need to train new members up in the way the team works, and this reduces what they can deliver themselves.
2. New members often mean new opinions and so the way the team works may get relitigated or time is taken to explain why it was agreed to do it that way.
3. The team will take time to assimilate the new skills mix and make it the team effective.
4. Often there are not enough tasks for two members with similar skills, so one member will be idle for a portion of the iteration.

The danger of old delivery behaviour

I would typically say that adding team members (often referred to as “resources”) was a Waterfall behaviour. But I’m not sure that the formal Waterfall approaches such as Prince 2 actually say that when you are not on track the answer is to randomly add more resources to solve the problem.

It is definitely the behaviour of people who have no experience in Agile. Their theory being that if the Agile Team are not delivering fast enough, then the answer is that everybody must be busy and to add more people to the team. This is often done without any understanding of the root cause for the lack of velocity.

I have actually seen examples where people have been arbitrarily added to an AgileBI Team, without the team actually being told the new members were turning up. Also without the project manager who was adding the people actually attending the retrospectives to ensure it was not a problem with the AgileBI process.