| Manager of remote teams here. Like any sane manager, I don’t pick an arbitrary bucket of tasks at the beginning of each week and declare “Finish these by Friday” and not care if it takes 10 or 100 hours. Instead, we work with the team to do things like sprint planning with input from the team’s velocity. We target a reasonable workload assuming people are at their desks for a normal workday amount of time. The problem is that for some people, individual velocity plummets when they go remote. Their estimates skyrocket because they either know their productivity is down or they think it will be easier to get away with if nobody can physically see them. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone as I have some great remote teams, but I’ve also churned through some otherwise good engineers who were great in office but admitted that they just couldn’t focus at home. Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. We work around it and plan it in, but it’s another reminder that remote is hard for even the good remote workers. Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous. More often than not, people have to work together on things and be available to answer questions, fix things, or otherwise stay in the loop with updates. When people are disappearing for hours every day during the team’s core working time, this all gets slowed down immensely. I don’t care if two people who work together agree to work together at 3AM or noon, but the teams have to be present and available to cowork on things. |
I’d say that’s your first problem. Isn’t this the whole (popular) idea of creating a sprint, then not modifying the sprint as it’s ongoing?
> velocity drops come summer time like clockwork
I don’t see how this makes things harder to measure. The very statement of it implies you have measured it and know it to be true.
> Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous
This is true of in-person work too. If anything, someone being at a desk means that the collaborative work is probably not getting done in that scenario.