In absence of a better question, management often keeps asking for more velocity. Does this sound familiar? “The project is behind schedule!” Pressure increases quickly. As a consequence, urgent, top-down ad-hoc actions are implemented to shape the group to “be a highly performant team”.
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Here's a little thought experiment.
The directive is simple: "We're behind the project plan. Get faster."
Imagine you could finger-snap, and velocity increases 10x. Every ounce of slack is squeezed out. The system operates at maximum utilization. The team is sprinting, hitting max load and throughput. Management celebrates their win.
Then, a second project appears. Urgent. Unplanned.
What are your options? Can you ask the sprinter to run even faster?
Pause here.
This thought experiment reveals a common trap. In the pursuit of maximum efficiency, we relentlessly optimize — often, with zero tolerance for error. The result? A team or an organization that simply cannot handle the one thing that’s guaranteed in business: the unexpected.
So, is the solution to simply not aim for more velocity? No, not so fast. Let’s take a step back.
The Hidden Cost of Overemphasising on Velocity
The obsessive focus on speed, velocity, getting faster, accelerating — or whatever your management chain calls it — creates a dangerous blind spot. While everyone celebrates the rising velocity metrics, another critical variable was decreasing in the dark: System Healthiness.
Focusing mainly on velocity without sufficient attention to health leads to an unbalanced system that burns out its people. For those working with Scrum in sprints, take a moment to reflect on this.
However, even if the two factors—attention to speed and people's well-being—were considered, alternating between them creates a volatile system. This volatility will sooner or later create friction. Why?
- From the outside, accountables will ask themselves how reliable they can plan, deliver, and promise with this volatile system, always fearing that deadlines cannot be kept.
- For employees within such a system, the experience can be deeply unpleasant, feeling like an endless rollercoaster ride.
A pivotal element to overcome the rollercoaster way of working are considerations on predictability that ultimately helps to flatten out the most of the volatility dips. Recognizing that a slow and steady flow is superior in the long run, compared to the sprint-rest-sprint approach, is crucial. High performing organizations know this by heart.
As principal architect of Toyota's TPS system, Taiichi Ohno, once said:
The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is much more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises.
The unexpected hits your system in waves. No matter how much you optimize - something will happen. Therefore, a healthy organization/team is robust and able to comprehend “the unexpected” with minimal friction.
From theory to a more practical example
When a project faces a delay, the instinctive—and often most damaging—reaction is to demand cheap solutions. These often include:
- overtime
- micromanagement
- weekend work
- the enforcement of rigid lunch breaks
- revisiting everyone's calendars
- cancelling personal time off
- or imposing unrealistic deadlines without proper resource allocation
While such measures might offer a temporary illusion of progress, their long-term impact can be profoundly harmful. Such methods solely address the immediate symptoms of delay, thereby failing to resolve the fundamental systemic issues.
Instead of defaulting to these cheap fixes - over and over - we must think systematically and longer term about it. Instead of solely asking 'how can we fix this now?', we must elevate our perspective beyond the immediate crisis to questions like:
- How can we prevent this from recurring? or
- How can we effectively manage or avert similar situations in the future?
Ultimately, the objective is to find a sustainable solution, rather than a mere ad-hoc fix that will inevitably require repeated intervention.
Diagnose the Root of the Problem
Before you prescribe a solution, you should perform a root cause analysis. Instead of defaulting to the team’s velocity, you will likely uncover the true systemic issues. Perhaps:
- the initial estimate was wildly optimistic,
- a key dependency was misunderstood, or
- sales signed a new urgent project that demanded immediate attention.
The goal is to derive real learnings and implement structural fixes, rather than merely treating symptoms.
Invest in Real Speed, Not Cheap Speed
This brings us to a critical distinction. A request to improve performance is legitimate and necessary for growth. However, we must separate cheap speed from real speed.
- Cheap speed comes from unsustainable, short-term fixes: weekend work, canceled breaks, micromanagement, and the removal of slack. It provides a temporary illusion of progress while destroying Healthiness and Predictability.
- Sustainable long-term velocity increases are achieved through systemic improvements. This involves investing in automation, refining workflows, optimizing processes, and providing better tools that reduce friction. Additionally, it encompasses (re-)shaping how the team works and collaborates, changing the organizational design, among numerous other levers. These are the valid pursuits that can increase a team's/organization's performance while keeping it healthy and predictable.
- Beyond processes and tools lies a fundamental human dimension. Often, individuals continue working on what they have in the past, a path that risks locking them into past areas of expertise, ignoring how their strengths and curiosities have evolved. A more profound strategy is to look beyond mere skill sets and consider what truly drives people: their inherent strengths, their curiosity about certain topics, and their personal ambitions for growth. When you align projects with what energizes your team and supports their development, productivity and velocity increase as a natural byproduct, not a mandated goal.
Measuring for Sustainable Performance: Velocity, Predictability, and Healthiness
"Okay, so how do we make this actionable?" I can hear you asking. You can't manage what you don't measure. We have three interconnected variables: Velocity, Predictability, and Healthiness, and the intent to improve sustainability.
The first crucial step is to establish a baseline. Remember, perfection is the enemy of progress; therefore, the goal isn't to track every single thing. Instead, select a few meaningful metrics for each category that are truly relevant to your specific context.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
Velocity: How much work is getting done?
- Story Points Completed per Iteration: A relative estimate of effort required to complete a user story, commonly used as a measure of output in agile frameworks.
- Cycle Time: The duration from work initiation to completion, indicating efficiency.
- Load and Throughput: The rate at which work is completed and the size of the work.
- Scope Completed vs. Planned Over Time: A direct comparison of delivered work against initial projections.
- Waste: Non-value-adding activities or inefficiencies within the value creation chain.
- Work in Progress (WIP) Load: The total amount of work currently being actively worked on, indicating potential bottlenecks.
Predictability: How reliable is our delivery?
- Say/Do Ratio: Compares committed work to actually delivered work, indicating forecasting accuracy.
- Throughput Volatility: The standard deviation of your throughput, revealing consistency.
- Amount of Unplanned Work or Scope Creep over Time: The volume of work added or changed outside of initial planning, representing disruptions.
- Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) for Services: Measures how quickly services recover from incidents, reflecting resilience.
- Bug Count or Defect Rate: Indicators of quality and the stability of output.
Healthiness: What is the human and systemic cost of our work?
- Employee Satisfaction Surveys: Direct feedback on morale, engagement, and well-being.
- Qualitative Feedback (Retrospectives, Post-mortems, Q&A Sessions): Rich insights into team dynamics, issues, and emotional states.
- Slack Time Integrity: time allocated that allows teams to handle unexpected issues, innovate, or improve their work without delaying the project's release.
Ultimately, there is no magic metric. The idea to focus on Velocity, Predictability, and Healthiness simultaneously is not a map, but a compass. The right approach depends entirely on your context—for instance, a scrum team’s vital signs will differ significantly from those of a fixed-scope waterfall project. So instead of thinking of them as the ultimate truth, think about them as tools for navigating.
Pick one metric from each category that is relevant. Establish baseline metrics. Use it to ask better questions. The goal is to begin a continuous cycle of observing, generating insights, and inspecting - while incrementally introducing new improvements for more velocity.
Final Thoughts
Adapt to Reality First. Remember, reality will always challenge your plans with some randomness—no matter how perfect they are. Ignoring reality in favor of a perfect mental model only leads to dissatisfaction. If priorities shift frequently, we must first accept that this is our current environment. We must adapt to our contextual reality first, and only then can we work to change it.
Master the Use of Slack. In a volatile world, the most important variable you have control over is slack—the dedicated time for unforeseen events —the unknown-unknowns and ad-hoc urgent requests that typically derail perfect plans. (It is not the same as 'buffer'). Too much slack, and performance decreases; too little, and your system’s health will suffer. The goal is to find the right balance.
Strengthen the Gate. A healthy organization is robust and aware that 'the unexpected' hits in waves. This robustness is primarily a management task—acting as a 'gate' where commitments are made to the team or organization. If this gate is weakly managed, it often becomes the most common source of an unbalanced, unpredictable, unhealthy, and ultimately low-velocity system.
By focusing on Velocity, Predictability, and Healthiness, and by wisely managing slack and ensuring organizational robustness, we can move beyond the velocity trap and cultivate truly high-performing, sustainable systems that navigate the unexpected with ease.
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