The Daily Standup

Converting Story Points to Money - Mike Cohn It’s often worthless to tell a boss, client, or customer that a project will be done in, say, 142 story points.
Even if stakeholders fully understand what a story point is, telling them how many points a project will take or cost isn’t awfully helpful to them.
These stakeholders are accustomed to hearing how much time and money a project will take. And it’s important that teams and their leaders communicate with stakeholders in the terms those stakeholders prefer.
Fortunately, it is quite straightforward to convert an estimate of points into money. Here’s how.
 From Points to Dollars
To start, gather data on how much the team has been paid over a period of time. Ideally this should be at least a few months, but you could start with as little as one sprint.
Next, divide total team compensation by the number of story points delivered by the team in that period. This gives you a cost per point.
For example, suppose a team has been paid $100,000 over some period. During the same period, the team delivered 100 story points. Dividing $100,000 by 100 gives a cost per point of $1,000.
This can then be multiplied by the total expected size of the project to give an estimate of the total financial cost.
 Getting Fancy (If You Want)
You can get fancy with this calculation, if you’d like. Instead of using compensation as I did in this example, you might want to use fully loaded labor cost. As its name implies, this includes compensation as well as other costs such as benefits, overhead, and payroll expenses (taxes, Social Security in the U.S., etc.).
A company controller can easily (and usually immediately) provide this as a percentage. It will typically be in the range of 25–40% added to compensation.
You can get fancy by trying to adjust for seasonality or team size changes. However, that’s usually not worth the effort: it shouldn’t significantly impact the cost per point.
Keep it simple.
Clearly communicating expected costs with your stakeholders will improve your relationship with them. Everyone appreciates being communicated with in terms they understand. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

The #1 Most Common Mistake With User Stories Output is a fixation we can’t seem to shake in the product space. We continue to think we know the right product to build before we build it. This often shows up in the way we treat user stories as requirements. Even though many product teams and managers think user stories are requirements, they aren’t.  How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Product Vision & Scrum Events A product vision is a succinct, inspiring articulation of where your product is heading. It embodies the essence of your product — the core values it upholds, the core needs it fulfils, or the core problems it solves. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

5 Ideas Fix Your Work Life Balance

1. Focus only on your part of the pyramid
2. Manage your energy levels, not hours
3. Prioritize based on importance (and energy again)
4. Rely on others when needed
5. Say no and yes

How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

The Surprising Cost of Bad Estimates - Mike Cohn Bad plans lead to many well-known problems. Teams deliver later than expected. Or the budget is blown by adding people in the hope that will help. Sometimes a deadline is met but by dropping important features. Or the deadline is met by team members working overtime, causing burnout, frustration, and usually introducing bugs. Inaccurate plans frustrate both team members and stakeholders. But one of the worst, and perhaps most overlooked, impacts of a poor project plan is that the team loses credibility with its stakeholders. As an example of how poor planning affects credibility, I’ve got a friend whom I’ll occasionally meet for lunch. He’s always 5 to 10 minutes late. If he emails me today and suggests meeting at noon, I’m going to arrive 5 minutes late myself. I no longer trust him to be on time. His plans just aren't reliable. And that's OK because it’s just lunch. But the credibility gap caused by unreliable plans is much worse on projects. Consider a team that is either consistently late or always has to drop scope to meet a deadline. The project stakeholders ask this team if they can deliver a new project in 3 months. Team members think about it and decide they can’t deliver it in 3 months, but could do it in 4 months. When the team members tell the stakeholders they need an extra month, the stakeholders don’t believe them. Why should they? The team has been consistently wrong on all prior projects. At this point, stakeholders may tell the team to do it in 3 months anyway. And why not? If a team never meets its stated deadlines, stakeholders may reason that they’ll stick with the 3-month deadline to apply some pressure, which has limited effectiveness. (And like me with my friend, they might also quietly expect it to be done later, in perhaps 4 months.) Here's the bottom line: stakeholders will not treat a team as an equal partner if the team consistently provides bad plans and inaccurate estimates. Credibility is such an important factor that I include it as the first of four reasons agile teams estimate product backlog items in the first place! Consider how things may have played out differently if the team instead had established a track record of providing decent plans. Note I said decent. Plans don't have to be perfect to be reliable. When a consistently decent team tells stakeholders a project will take an extra month, stakeholders are likely to engage in a conversation about options to meet the desired, earlier deadline:

• Would it help to enlarge the team?
• Is there a feature or two that could be dropped or deferred?
• Would it help if team members were allowed to focus solely on this product instead of also supporting some old product?

When a team has a track record of presenting reasonably accurate plans, they will be treated as equal partners by the rest of the organization. Many teams try to solve the problem of inaccurate plans by padding their next plans. This usually makes things worse as the team now has two things to estimate:

• The plan, and
• How much to pad the plan

When stakeholders call the team on padding the plan, the padding is often removed unless team members can present solid logic and evidence for the size of the padding. A better solution would be for team members to assess why their plans have consistently been wrong. Sometimes the problem is due to poor agile estimation. If that’s the case, there are many things team members can do to improve estimates of story size. I’ll share just one technique now that's especially helpful for teams who chronically underestimate the amount of work involved in a particular product backlog item. It’s called unpacking. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Happy Boss's Day - A Message From Kim How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

4 Reliable Traits of Genuinely High Performing Leaders

1. Self-belief paired with humility
2. Decisiveness
3. A bias for action
4. Thinking like a gymnast, not a sumo wrestler

How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

How Relevant Are The Agile Principles Today? 2001 is the official birth year of Agile. It took the world by storm. Millions of professionals have found new ways of creating software (and other products) using the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (or Agile Manifesto). At the height of Agile, people saw it as a panacea for all software-related, even all product-related problems. Nowadays, Agile is a commodity. “Everyone” works Agile these days. Some proclaim we are in the post-Agile era. Others say Agile is Dead. Is Agile Really Dead? How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Why Can't You Enjoy Life? Living used to be colorful, and now it’s like I don’t even want to fight anymore. I don’t want to become ‘successful’. I don’t want to wake up and go to work, day after day. I don’t want to learn and I don’t want to read. I don’t want to explore the world. I don’t even want to entertain myself. What’s this?!
How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

What To Do When Your Team Says They Do Not Need The Daily Scrum? When your team pushes back against the daily stand-up, responding with thoughtfulness and adaptability is essential. The daily collaboration meeting, whether you call it a stand-up or something else, plays a crucial role in Agile success. However, it’s not just about keeping the meeting-it’s about ensuring it serves its true purpose of fostering alignment, communication, and collaboration. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/