Story Points are NOT a project management tool

I’ve recently had a spirited conversation with another coach regarding the use of points with their specific feedback that they keep a team from being Agile and management will weaponize them against the teams.

I won’t argue that story points have been abused across the board primarily because I believe they are used as a project management tool and not a planning input.

A key issue we see when moving to Agile is that management still wants to see when something will be ‘done’ and points become the mechanism to convey that metric, but it’s a meaningless metric. In an Agile context our focus in on value, as we want to continually attempt to this and when we deliver enough we want to stop and move on the next most valuable thing.

The law of diminishing returns is easily applied to Agile because we know that there is a point in our development of features or capabilities where the cost (measured by the cost of the sprint) exceeds the value (outcomes and measurable results) we will obtain from doing the work.

Story points should only be used as a planning input to future work and if the team has a consistent velocity of 30 points, and they indicate something is around 300 points, we can reasonably say it will take ‘around’ 10 sprints to deliver this work.

The word ‘around’ is key here, Agile doesn’t deliver to dates we deliver to value, when you stop seeing sufficient value you stop working, simple as that.

And story points are like the tag line on Whose Line Is It, where they say that the points awarded to the people on the show are made up and none of it matters. I coach Leaders to not pay any attention to the amount of a team’s story points, instead pay attention to their predictability.

You get zero value out of measuring velocity to determine when something will be done because you own the decision to stop at any time.

Instead, your focus needs to be on a way of determining value and focus on the delivery of that over story points, which are merely a representation of the size of work we do to deliver that value.

And truthfully there are other ways to determine how much work a team can do every sprint so if it’s not story points experiment with the number of stories per sprint, etc…the key is to have an idea of how much a team can accomplish in any given sprint to use an input to planning.

The predictable cadence of delivery builds confidence with leaders and just saying we aren’t estimating or giving an insight into how effective we are at working isn’t fair to leaders who have to communicate where the organization is going and how they are getting there to customers and investors.

Customers don’t expect to be told we’ll get that new feature to you sometime…..I’ve walked away from products that I loved simply because the organization could not consistently tell me when new features would be enabled and when their competitors delivered what I was needed, I switched.

Story points aren’t a project management tool, and they have certainly been abused, but they can provide a guide set expectations to when something might be done.