D is for De-Motivating

If you want to de-motivate your Scrum team, be sure to grade them every Sprint based on # of points delivered or worse - % complete!

I recently heard from a Scrum Team where leadership had come up with a "clever" (read: painful) process. At the end of each Sprint, they would count up the number of story points the team delivered, divide that by the number of points they had planned, and assign a grade to the Sprint—just like in high school. If they hit 100% of their planned work, it was an A. If they didn’t? B, C… or D. And to top it all off, each of the Scrum teams in the company was pitted against every other, because the grades were compared.

I really can't think of anything less motivating. Teams that worked really hard in the Sprint or had a stretch goal for the Sprint would - naturally - have lower grades than teams working on less mission-critical work.

Teams working on complex, mission-critical products are often dealing with high levels of uncertainty. That means more unexpected learning, more adaptation, and more discoveries along the way. These are exactly the kinds of teams who need support—not shame. But under a grading system like this, they’re punished simply because their work is complex.

So what do teams do? They pad their estimates. They play it safe. They focus on gaming the numbers instead of delivering value.

Sound familiar?

The Wrong Kind of Motivation

A system like this does more than just frustrate the team—it chips away at trust, autonomy, and morale. Instead of asking, “What value did we deliver this Sprint?” the conversation becomes, “How do we get an A?”

It’s a distraction. A demoralizing one.

Teams start to under-commit just to avoid a low grade. And when they do fall short, despite working hard and learning important lessons, they get a failing grade. One that’s shared with leadership. Or worse—broadcast across teams.

What a pointless exercise. (Pun intended.)

Focus on the Right Metrics

In Scrum, the purpose of each Sprint is to deliver a Done Increment that helps the team get closer to the Product Goal. It’s not to “complete points.” It’s not to hit 100% of a guess made during Sprint Planning. And it’s certainly not to earn an A+ from a rubric that measures how well they estimate or even how lucky the team is, not what value they provide.

Want to measure something that actually motivates your team and helps your customers? Try:

• Customer satisfaction

• Product quality

• Time to learning

• Cycle time

• Customer outcomes

Scrum is a framework for delivering value in complex environments—not a system for perfect predictions. (Ironically, Scrum teams are more likely than Waterfall teams to deliver hit a hard deadline, because they can adjust and adapt. But that doesn't mean that grading the Sprint based on % complete is a good idea.)

Final Thoughts

If your team is being graded on percent complete, it might be time to step back and ask: what are we really trying to deliver—and why? Shift the focus to metrics that track progress toward the Product Goal or real customer outcomes. You might just find that letting go of the grades is the first step to unlocking better outcomes for your team and your customers.