[ungawatkt]

I'd love to have this, but I see two near insurmountable problems for most teams:

- velocity metrics go down and timelines stretch, because effort is "wasted" on things that don't get finished.

- someone needs to do the boring hard work of laying out a whole project in advanced, fairly clearly if folks are allowed to jump around on the project.

Without those two, either the team looks bad to management or folks get stuck in a dead end even if they want to work on something (or spend their whole "20%" time just gathering requirements)

[ehnto]

> velocity metrics go down and timelines stretch

I think this only works for really particular companies anyway, eg: reasonably flat hierarchy, product owner with product market success.

If you are a startup running out of money, you'll want focus, if you have a tall hierarchy, management will have the say on what you're doing and higher than them will want performance metrics as you pointed out.

It works at Valve, for example, because it rains money on them and they are a flat company. Nearly no time pressure and no overall company goal that needs direction.

[darreninthenet]

Nobody should be using velocity as a metric anymore, it's pretty much now recognised as unhelpful as a measure of how a team is actually performing, I've seen it described as a vanity metric rather than a performance metric.

A team with a decent up to date SM or coach would be looking at their cycle time and throughput as decent measures of actual useful work delivered.