The most challenging part of Scrum — estimating tasks in story points

Today I want to talk about the most challenging part of Scrum — estimating tasks in story points.

Too many teams have started using Scrum the wrong way. Scrum is a revolutionary project management model. It means you can't transition to Scrum smoothly — that's its main disadvantage. You have to rebuild your work process at one moment completely. For example, Kanban is an evolutionary project management method, and you can implement it step by step, and I love it for that.

But how do you know how good your Scrum is? When I hear that team is working on Scrum, the first question I ask the team is — "How do you evaluate your tasks?". Usually, I get a response - "in story points, of course". Then the second question — "What is your story point?". As a rule, they say — "1 hour". And this means that Scrum does not work ultimately, and you have a micro-waterfall for two weeks with more frequent meetings. Try to ask these two questions to your IT teams, you will be surprised 🙂

Story points are the COMPLEXITY of the task. This is the critical difference between task scoring in Scrum and waterfall. You are estimating DIFFICULTY, not TIME, which you will spend to complete the task. Yes, you can calculate the time to complete a task using story points, but only later, when you know by experience the VELOCITY of the team and each member. Also, you can calculate the time of a task based on difficulty, but task difficulty based on time can't — all because different performers will spend different times completing the same task.

In the next post, I will tell you how to understand how to set up task assessment when switching to Scrum properly.

#team #work #scrum #estimating #complexity #projectmanagement