A while ago I was meeting with a group of senior VPs where I am coaching their development organizations. We were discussing measuring a team's ability to achieve it’s commitments. I suggested that we measure the ability of teams to make their commitments at the sprint level - the term Reliability is being suggested for this measurement. Did the team do what they committed to do? I find this a useful leading indicator for team performance.
What I got back surprised me. I was told that making commitments to customers was the only measurement that matters. Commitments at the sprint level were not as important. While this is understandable, it is not useful at the team level.
I realized that there was some basic misunderstanding going on. It clearly involved the word commitment and this is what David and I are exploring.
A commitment is a kind of promise BY someone TO someone. Let’s use that definition as a template, and consider some definitions crafted with Scrum terminology.
The first commitment we consider is the outward facing commitment to the customer:
Customer Commitment: a promise by Product Owner to Customer to deliver known feature(s) in a product by a certain date or event, often termed a release
This definition seems pretty clear to me. The customer may use this promise to reliably schedule other commitments, so our organization must be sure we can meet this commitment. In Scrum the product features are the responsibility of the Product Owner, so only the Product Owner may make the Customer Commitment.
The Team Commitment, on the other hand is made by the Team to the Product Owner:
Team Commitment: a promise by Team to Product Owner to complete selected Stories (Sprint Backlog) in Sprint
The definition also seems pretty clear to me. In this case, the Team is telling the Product Owner what they expect to complete given their average velocity. In 50% of the cases, they will complete more Stories, and in 50% of the Sprints, they will need to negotiate to move some Stories out of this Sprint before the end of the Sprint.
Did the confusion in my conversion with the executives arise from the two distinct uses of the word "commitment"? How do these two uses of the word "commitment" relate?
We will explore this further in the next post.
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. I suggested that we measure the ability of teams to make their commitments at the sprint level - the term Reliability is being suggested for this measurement. Did the team do what they committed to do? I find this a useful leading indicator for team performance.
What I got back surprised me. I was told that making commitments to customers was the only measurement that matters. Commitments at the sprint level were not as important. While this is understandable, it is not useful
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