Increasing Velocity by increasing the Team-Member Torque

SCRUM seems to be much about velocity and acceleration. So let’s stick to car terminology for a moment. If it is all about velocity and acceleration than contribution of each team member must be something like torque. Here is an interesting learn model I found very usefull to define the actual torque. It’s called KSA (Knowledge, Skills and Attitude) model.

Knowledge is practically all a person knows and includes theoretical and practical learning. Everything you learn from experience is also knowledge. While applying the knowledge to the work, while practicing, you acquire or strengthen your skills. Skills are about how well you do things. For example programming skills, presentations skills and communications skills are common to software engineering. Attitude, from my point of view, is about how willing you are to do your work.

A scale factor for each layer of the model multiplied together gives the torque of the indiviaual team member.

Lets define a scale, say 0 to 10, where 0 means not existing and 10 is maximum achievable value.

#example Having 7 in knowledge and in skills means 10 years or more of experience in certain field while continuously improving and learning ever since. But with a 3 in attitude you are probably dealing with the typical team member in “Waterfal”- organisations. The calculated torque for such a team member is  7x7x3=147. Out of 1000.

If SCRUM succedes to change the attitude of the team members by more engagement, free decision making, clear focus, responsibility, commitment etc. the torque of each team member can rise dramaticaly (e.g. if we change the attitude in the example from 3 to 7 we get 7x7x7=343). This doubling in the torque might be a reason for the rise of velocity in SCRUM projects.

• acceleration
• agile
• Code
• constinuous
• ksa
• Learning
• score
• SCRUM
• skill
• skills
• torque
• velocity