The Power of Commitment

“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.” ―?Peter F. Drucker

While this quote has nothing to do with agile, many of you working in agile projects might already know Sprint Commitment Ratio a.k.a Completion Against Commitment (CaC) is a key metric that adds value to project execution. It shows the predictability of the team to deliver the work they have planned – basically ‘what was completed’ vs ‘what was planned’ in the sprint. One of the most painful things to see is a team consistently missing their sprint commitment. Morale of the team becomes low and leader's faith in the team diminishes. If a team does miss a commitment the important thing is to learn from that experience and apply that knowledge when making the next sprint commitment so it will be met.

Measuring this commitment indirectly helps to measure the Collaboration, Planning and Requirement quality of the team as well. ?While people may feel that companies are trying to deliver maximum number of items by keeping a focus on Sprint commitment, the real intention is not that. Yes, Improved time to market and predictability is definitely a positive outcome of good commitment ratio. But the real benefit of tracking this is in improvement in planning, collaboration, dependency tracking efficiency of the team.

When team's start tracking this measure, they will start thinking about these points.

·??????Why were we not able to finish this story?

·??????Was the requirement description incomplete or unclear?

·??????We had a dependency, but did we miss to work with that team and make it a priority ?

·??????Did somebody else in the squad had bandwidth to help finish the pending work?

·??????Did we have technical problems which we could have anticipated better?

·??????Did we wrongly estimate or we took more stories than we could possibly finish in sprint?

·??????Should we have left some space in sprint for the unplanned work that comes in all sprints ?

Another best practice is taking the unfinished stories to the Sprint Retrospective, discuss these insights and try to learn and improve as a team so that it is one tad better in the next sprint.

While they focus on Sprint Commitment, it is ok if the team feels just a little bit guilty when they don’t finish everything. That would not mean they are demotivated, but it just shows the natural passion and fire in them to do all they can to deliver things of value. Once team start thinking like that, eventually it brings efficiency in upcoming sprints in terms of planning, better collaboration with Product and other dependent squads. You may never be able to completely eliminate spillover from projects. But with proper management and planning, you can reduce the number of times it may occur and reduce its impact.

And to the leaders or product owners, no one other than the team can make the sprint commitment, and all team members are accountable to make sure all aspects of the commitment are completed to the best practices and standards. ?So while you can guide them you should not be making the mistakes of making sprint commitments on behalf of them ?? That is where the Servant Leadership nature of agile comes to play.

Mike Cohn, founder of?Mountain Goat Software?and also author of some wonderful books on agile has also shared his views in his blog on?Why I Prefer Commitment-Driven Sprint Planning which is pretty much inline with this topic as well.

As we all know Agile is all about Inspect & adapt approach, but self-organization is the key. When the team is 'committed' & 'focused' they can do wonders.