Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

Very often teams compare themselves to other teams. Even when successful, the comparison is inevitable, and sometimes even pushed/fostered by stakeholders. Robbie shares a story of a team that got stuck in the comparison of velocity with another team. And even if the team was working great, they were still trying to “achieve” the same number of story points that the other team was doing. Even when asked not to focus on the number, the team worked on getting their velocity higher, and higher, but not because they were working better, just because they were assigning more story points to the same work! In this episode, we discuss this and other anti-patterns that emerge when teams start focusing on the velocity, rather than the impact of the work they have ahead. 

Featured Book of the Week: Scrum, the art of doing twice the work in half the time by Sutherland

In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time,  by Sutherland Robbie found an inspiring book that helped him find the Scrum Master career. He describes the book as filled with solutions and valuable even for people with significant experience! 

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Robbie Ross

Robbie is an Agile Practice Manager at Jumar Technology with a passion for working with and empowering teams to foster an Agile environment at scale. He’s also a Certified Scrum Master, Kanban practitioner and Agile community member helping teams release their genuine potential to deliver value. Quite a career shift since completing a Sports Science degree at University.

You can link with Robbie Ross on LinkedIn and connect with Robbie Ross on Twitter.