Priority Inversion: The Silent Killer of High-Performing Development Teams
Priority Inversion silently kills team productivity when low-priority tasks block high-value features. Priority Inheritance protocols restore systematic value delivery.
When Your Sprint Falls Behind: The Shortest Processing Time Strategy That Agile Teams Wish They'd Known Earlier
Manufacturing’s Shortest Processing Time strategy adapted for failing sprints: prioritise quick wins within your sprint’s qualitative goal framework.
The ROI of Better Software Productivity Measurement (Real Numbers From Real Companies)
When you measure the right things, you unlock incredible potential. Let me share some real numbers from companies I’ve coached, demonstrating the tangible return on investment from a smarter approach to software productivity measurement:
Your Retrospectives Aren't Working Because You're Measuring the Wrong Things
“Same issues, different sprint.” Does that resonate with your team? Your retrospectives dutifully identify problems, action items are meticulously recorded, and then… nothing fundamentally changes. The real issue often isn’…
Why Your Sprint Velocity Isn't Telling You What You Think It Is (And What to Measure Instead)
Once upon a time, there was a brilliant developer who got everything they thought they wanted – a promotion to CTO.
Every day, they would look at their dashboard showing im…
The Productivity Paradox: Why Adding More Developers Slows Down Your Delivery
Despite expanding an engineering team and investing in advanced tools, delivery timelines worsened due to a misleading focus on individual productivity over system productivity. Increasing developer numbers led to communication overhead, dependency conflicts, and context switching. Shifting to flow-centric metrics improved collaboration and sustainable productivity, enabling faster, higher-quality delivery.
Velocity: How to interpret it to improve your agile team productivity. 3 of 3: What-if and FAQ
This is the final article of this series.
his third article contains some Q&A that are commonly asked when dealing with velocity.
Velocity: How to interpret it to improve your agile team productivity. 2 of 3: When velocity is read wrong
Second installement of the How to interpret Velocity to improve your agile team productivity.
This article will detail the information contained in each metric and how to use it to improve team productivity.
Velocity: How to interpret it to improve your agile team productivity. 1 of 3: Flavours of Velocity
Velocity is a commonly used metric in agile teams. It is a great metric due to its apparent simplicity. However, I often see teams drawing the wrong conclusions for the metric, which results in decreased productivity.
This post is the beginning of a three-part series to convey my understanding of how to make sense of the information that velocity, as a metric, can provide to an agile team. And use this information to improve the team’s productivity.