Comment by riffraff
2 years ago
The predicting value is only per-team. If your team does 10 points per sprint, it won't deliver 20. If it does 100, it will.
But it's an important tenet of scrum that velocity is only meaningful in a single team[0], the root management failure in OP's case is comparing different teams.
[0] and teams cheat themselves too. I recall one advice early in my career that a velocity increase with no underlying process change was likely to mean.. that the team started to overestimate complexity, and one should understand what went wrong.
If your team is doing mostly similar work and the team has the same composition for a long period, points can have some meaning.
When a team shifts projects, and changes members, there are too many variables and not enough data points, so points become useless.
Since most teams change both of those thing fairly frequently, in the close to 20 years I’ve been doing this, points are generally not helpful.