Working towards Sustainable Pace in Scrum, SAFe and Kanban

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Aiming towards Sustainable Pace

“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” – The Agile Manifesto Principle

“programmers or software developers should not work more than 40 hour weeks, and if there is overtime one week, that the next week should not include more overtime.” – Extreme Programming

An unsustainable pace is unhealthy. It contributes to burnout, quality issues, and unpredictable results.

If you are an agile leader – do you know whether your teams are currently operating at a sustainable pace? Do you care? Would you rather not know because you’re afraid of the answer?

Measuring Sustainable Pace

Beyond having a general idea of the sustainability of pace, perhaps it would help to have a concrete KPI related to it?

If we use the language of OKRs, maybe something along these lines:

Objective Achieve a healthy sustainable pace

KR1 – People working reasonable hours AMB (as measured by) hours per week

KR2 – People happy about their pace AMB continuous survey 

KR3 – Plans don’t assume unsustainable pace AMB ability to achieve forecasts without resorting to unsustainable pace measures

Forecasting towards Sustainable Pace by inspecting sustainability of past pace

The last KR relates to the planning/forecasting approaches we use in agile. Agile approaches leverage empirical planning approaches. They look at the past (Yesterday’s weather) to try and forecast the future. Whether it is PI Planning, Sprint/Iteration planning. Whether by looking at Velocity, Throughput, or Cycle/Flow Times – most approaches tend to ignore how these past results were achieved when using them to predict future capacity.

For example, if our velocity in previous Sprints was 15-20 points, we will probably take on about 15-20 points. But what if these 15-20 points required a herculean effort that wasn’t sustainable?

Similarly – if we just concluded a PI in which the ART achieved a Program Predictability Score of 85% we will be tempted to assume we have a pretty serviceable approach to planning/forecasting. But what if this required killing it through nights and weekends and skipping any sort of Innovation in the IP iteration? Where does this come into the calculation?

If our cycle/flow times are 7-10 days 85% of the time we will be tempted to set that as an SLE (Service Level Expectation) to ourselves. But does that make sense if this was achieved while working 60 hour weeks?

Planning/Forecasting using a Sustainability Factor

What I’m advising teams/organizations I’m working with is to consider the “sustainability factor” when considering any past results for the purpose of forecasting the future and adjusting accordingly. This isn’t trivial. It requires making sustainable pace an explicit “citizen” of the measurement dashboard and conversation.

We have learned that speed and quality are related. We now understand that inappropriate speed might be at the expense of quality, so we look at a balanced scorecard of speed and quality. Moving forward, we need to add pace sustainability to this scorecard and to the conversation around how much work does it make sense to forecast.

A metric I’ve been toying with is Weighted Predictability/Sustainability:

Predictability(Un)SustainabilityWeighted
80%150%53%
80%100%80%
60%100%60%
100%150%67%

As you can see here, achieving reasonable predictability scores is weighted down by the unsustainable pace required to achieve them. so a score of 80% is actually weighted down to 53%. This 53% is what should be used for future planning purposes. For example in SAFe I&A and PIP.

Moving Forward – Treating Pace Sustainability as a first-class citizen

First, we need to come up with a good name for this metric / KPI. Flow Sustainability? Pace Sustainability? Work Sustainability? Burnout Risk?
Are you explicitly measuring anything related to Sustainable Pace? Do you have goals around it? Do you take it into consideration when planning? Please share in the comments!

Subscribe for Email Updates:

Categories:

Tags:

Professional Scrum with Kanban
PI Planning
Portfolio for Jira
AI Artificial Intelligence
Games and Exercises
Jira Cloud
Software Development Estimation
Legacy Enterprise
WIP
Continuous Improvement
Lean Software Development
Agile Community
System Archetypes
Nexus
Achieve Business Agility
SAFe
Lean Agile Organization
Software Development
Systems Thinking
Agility
Presentation
Enterprise DevOps
Reading List
Development Value Streams
Continuous Integration
Releases Using Lean
Kanban Basics
ART Success
Agile Contracts Best Practices
Jira Plans
Scrum Values
Lean and Agile Techniques
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
Change Management
QA
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Lean-Agile Budgeting
IT Operations
Program Increment
ATDD vs. BDD
Certified SAFe
Release Train Engineer
LAB
Sprint Retrospectives
Agile Israel Events
Continuous Delivery
Kanban 101
Hybrid Work
Agile Project
Kaizen Workshop
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Continuous Deployment
Engineering Practices
Agile Techniques
Kanban Kickstart Example
Business Agility
Lean Risk Management
Agile Assembly Architecture
Scrum Master Role
Agile Release Planning
Kanban Game
Scrum and XP
Agile Product Development
Quality Assurance
Lean Agile Leadership
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Lean Startup
Legacy Code
Self-organization
Covid19
Agile in the Enterprise
speed at scale
Agile Games
Spotify
Agile Marketing
Agile Games and Exercises
RTE
RTE Role
TDD
Implementing SAFe
SAFe Release Planning
SAFe DevOps
Scrum Primer
Test Driven Development
Webinar
Atlaassian
Process Improvement
Slides
GanttBan
Amdocs
Tips
Scaled Agile Framework
Nexus Integration Team
Risk Management on Agile Projects
The Kanban Method
Coaching Agile Teams
Agile Development
Kanban
ScrumMaster Tales
Agile Project Management
Scrum.org
Nexus vs SAFe
Value Streams
Professional Scrum Master
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Agile and DevOps Journey
Agile Product Ownership
NIT
Agile Testing Practices
System Integration Environments
An Appreciative Retrospective
ROI
Effective Agile Retrospectives
Frameworks
The Agile Coach
BDD
What Is Kanban
Agile
LeSS
Scrum Master
Lean-Agile Software Development
Introduction to Test Driven Development
Scrum
Lean Agile Basics
Continuous Planning
Agile Program
Operational Value Stream
Risk Management in Kanban
Agile Release Management
Sprint Iteration
Code
Built-In Quality
ALM Tools
Applying Agile Methodology
Risk-aware Product Development
Video
POPM
Agile Risk Management
PI Objectives
SA
Lean Agile
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Rapid RTC
System Team
Limiting Work in Progress
AgileSparks
EOS®
SPC
Agile for Embedded Systems
Pomodoro Technique
Agile Basics
Perfection Game
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Product Management
Agile Outsourcing
Agile Delivery
Agile Israel
Large Scale Scrum
Manage Budget Creation
Agile Mindset
RSA
Product Ownership
Kaizen
Daily Scrum
Professional Scrum Product Owner
speed @ scale
Nexus and Kanban
Agile India
Managing Projects
LPM
Nexus and SAFe
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
lean agile change management
ATDD
Introduction to ATDD
Certification
Lean Budgeting
agileisrael
Planning
Sprint Planning
Agile Exercises
ARTs
Scrum With Kanban
Story Slicing
Artificial Intelligence
Scrum Guide
Advanced Roadmaps
Lean Agile Management
DevOps
Elastic Leadership
AgileSparks
Logo
Enable registration in settings - general

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart