Story Points vs. Time Metrics
A tool used for the wrong job
cannot do the right one.
Story points show complexity. Time needs its own metrics.
Story points help one crew talk about how complex a piece of work is. They are not hours, and they do not travel between crews: when someone joins or leaves, the scale moves with them. Questions about time are answered by flow metrics: how many items finish per week, how long each one takes. They come straight from the board, without anyone turning points into days.
A catch of herring can be counted. Nobody needs to guess.
What an honest system shows by itselfThroughput
How many come aboard each week.
Cycle time
How long one takes from the net to the deck.
Work in progress
How many are in the net right now.
Work item age
The one that has been in the net too long.
Easy to count, right?
Points measure the catch, not the clock
Find the smallest catch and the biggest, then place everything else between them. That is all story points were made for.
Gear, skills, room in the hold: a whale is one job for a whaler, another for a fishing boat.
The numbers grow fast on purpose: the bigger the catch, the more complex the hunt.
Five ways to count the wrong thing
Story points are a fine tool inside one crew. Trouble starts when they are asked to answer questions they were never made for.
more fishVelocity always has to rise, when it was meant to stay steady and help the crew find its balance.
How status overhead shows
Typical indicators. Not a complete list, but the ones that show up most often.
Let the flow tell the time
Every company needs to know when a voyage ends and how long one catch takes. Four charts that answer questions around time, and more.
- Will we make the date?
- Where does work pile up?
- Is the backlog growing faster than the catch?
- How much fits before the date?
- How likely is the date we promised?
- What does more cargo do to the arrival?
- Which kind of work keeps landing above the line?
- Is the crew getting more predictable?
- How long is too long for one catch?
- Which catch will miss its usual time?
- Where does work wait the longest?
- Is it time to finish before starting more?
Metrics are there to steady the ship, not to compare or push the crew.
They belong to the crew that sails, not to every deck above it. Used to judge a crew, they soon show what the judges want to see.
More on the subject …
… in the Logbook
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