A package just arrived, express mail from a toy store. I tear it open and inside are 40 PEZ dispensers and candy. They are gifts for the teams. Tomorrow will be a delightful day.
PEZ in place of Task Hours
When the team acknowledged that the task estimates would never accumulate to the number of work hours in the week - we had a great discussion. The team of 5 people worked the typical 40 to 45 hour workweek. Yes, we had lots of overhead chores that took us away from actual productive work on story tasks each week. As well as those pesky Scrum meetings like planning, review & retrospective. Heck - just doing the company's time accounting BS each week took an hour. Yet, it wasn't like we only worked 3 to 5 hours per day. Maybe we would be much more effective if we worked half days.
Is it our inability to estimate accurately? Our over-optimistic nature? The fact that many of our tools required too much time to navigate and we spent too much time working for the tool - rather than the tools working for us?
Never-the-less we do around 130 to 200 task hours in a 400-hour sprint. It is obvious that an estimated hour does not equate to a clock's 60 minutes. And with the realization that displaying the task hours on each sticky note on the board was a lie, we had to change something. The team, with our Guide's help, decided upon the change after a long discussion. Some thought it was of little concern to them. Some caught onto the Scrum Value of transparency - stating that we should not state that a task will take 2 hours if it doesn't get done in about 120 minutes. Looking at our sprint statistics it would appear that the typical 2-hour task might take a day or maybe complete in 10 minutes. It was quite unpredictable, and with other teams taking note of our board they might be misled on dependent work.
The change was simple: a fractal pattern of the classic story point. The team would abstract the unit of effort for a task. We could then empirically measure and determine the ratio of task effort to time. The team chose the unit of PEZ for the abstract unit of task effort, e.g. "oh, that's a 3 PEZ task."
See Also:
What is an Agile Transition Guide?
PEZ -or- Why one shouldn't track Scrum Tasks in Hours
PEZ in place of Task Hours
When the team acknowledged that the task estimates would never accumulate to the number of work hours in the week - we had a great discussion. The team of 5 people worked the typical 40 to 45 hour workweek. Yes, we had lots of overhead chores that took us away from actual productive work on story tasks each week. As well as those pesky Scrum meetings like planning, review & retrospective. Heck - just doing the company's time accounting BS each week took an hour. Yet, it wasn't like we only worked 3 to 5 hours per day. Maybe we would be much more effective if we worked half days.Is it our inability to estimate accurately? Our over-optimistic nature? The fact that many of our tools required too much time to navigate and we spent too much time working for the tool - rather than the tools working for us?
Never-the-less we do around 130 to 200 task hours in a 400-hour sprint. It is obvious that an estimated hour does not equate to a clock's 60 minutes. And with the realization that displaying the task hours on each sticky note on the board was a lie, we had to change something. The team, with our Guide's help, decided upon the change after a long discussion. Some thought it was of little concern to them. Some caught onto the Scrum Value of transparency - stating that we should not state that a task will take 2 hours if it doesn't get done in about 120 minutes. Looking at our sprint statistics it would appear that the typical 2-hour task might take a day or maybe complete in 10 minutes. It was quite unpredictable, and with other teams taking note of our board they might be misled on dependent work.
The change was simple: a fractal pattern of the classic story point. The team would abstract the unit of effort for a task. We could then empirically measure and determine the ratio of task effort to time. The team chose the unit of PEZ for the abstract unit of task effort, e.g. "oh, that's a 3 PEZ task."
See Also:
What is an Agile Transition Guide?
PEZ -or- Why one shouldn't track Scrum Tasks in Hours
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