One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.
One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
I try really hard when I’m in a scrum master position (my position is pretty chaotic, 20k person organisation, scaled agile, “we need your x skills this program increment, please would you?”) to hide my team’s individual performance from management. Mostly because your can’t compare a system analysts numbers to a mainframe programmer to a mid-range programmer, but also if someone’s not pulling their weight I want to solve the problem within the team where we can approach it as equals before resorting to management “performance review” systems.