What to do if I have two different teams with huge Velocity differences?

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Velocity is a measure of the amount of work a team can tackle during a single Sprint.

If you are not familiar with this concept, the following article can help you:

What is Velocity? Should we use it as a metric?

There are moments where managers have asked questions like:

If two teams have similar skillsets and have the same number of members, shouldn’t their velocities be similar?

Team Red’s Velocity is 2 times that of Team Blue’s — shouldn’t Team Red work on the remaining Product Backlog Items for faster delivery?

Each team uses its internal consensus to estimate the size of tasks at hand. Such sizing of efforts may differ from team to team due to differences in the reference points for these two teams.

Let’s say that you are leading a team with an average velocity of 85 points per iteration. Another team of the same size in the same company is working on a project with similar complexity. The other team’s velocity is averaging 155 points per month. What should you do?

Ignore the difference

Comparing the velocity between teams will not yield any benefits. In fact, it makes the teams very uncomfortable, as they would think that this metric is being used to measure the collective team and possibly their individual productivity. All teams face different challenges, work in different contexts, and estimate story points differently thus making comparison impossible. The team should instead focus on the value they deliver, and on identifying and eliminating impediments that hinder their performance.

Velocity is team-specific and unique to that team. In other words, a story point for one team probably wouldn’t have the same value as a story point for another team. Therefore, it is not appropriate to compare velocities between teams. The best choice would be to ignore the difference.

Remember, there is no such thing as a Good Velocity or a Bad Velocity.