Velocity – It Could Have Your Eye Out

This post is from mumbly.co.uk by Mark Stringer.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Imagine there was this tool that everybody said was fantastic – let’s say it was a wood chisel, let’s call it the Wonder Chisel. And all of the people from the Wonder company, who make the Wonder chisel claim that if you use the Wonder Chisel, your carvings will be totally awesome. And indeed, many skilled craftsmen who already understand how to use tools and know a lot about wood carving, achieve great things with the wonder chisel. But there’s a problem. Every amateur, not skilled in the art of wood carving, and I mean absolutely every one of them when they first pick it up, stabs themselves in the eye with this chisel. That would be a problem wouldn’t it? You would probably say that the wonder chisel has some design flaws. You would probably want to take it off the market until you’d fixed them. You might even want to brainstorm some other ideas and then try them out with amateurs before you release a literally blinding product like this on the market again.

This is how I feel about the Agile concept velocity. It is a massively powerful concept because in a very short space of time it can give you an answer to the question that people seem (we’ll come back to that later) the most desperate to answer in any project – when am I going to get my stuff? The concept is really simple. How do you manage a project?

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