> If we don't meet our target, it always feels like a fail. I know it shouldn't feel like that but it's human nature.
It definitely is human nature, and beyond that we're so trained to focus on goals and take them seriously that the "sprint goals" actually feel weaponized to me in order to get people to self-motivate/drive themselves. In the Scrum world engineers are fungible, so if one burns up or stops performing, you just replace them with a new one.
Also that "rough week at home" is going to show up on metrics for a very long time. A good manager understands the ebb and flow, but many do not. It also doesn't help that the Certified ScrumMaster® people will put so much emphasis on smoothness and consistency, and when it doesn't happen there's always someone/something to blame. When you remove the context (like team lead who knows what happened) and put it in a quarterly chart for upper management, you get a lot of bad and counter-productive conclusions.
It definitely is human nature, and beyond that we're so trained to focus on goals and take them seriously that the "sprint goals" actually feel weaponized to me in order to get people to self-motivate/drive themselves. In the Scrum world engineers are fungible, so if one burns up or stops performing, you just replace them with a new one.
Also that "rough week at home" is going to show up on metrics for a very long time. A good manager understands the ebb and flow, but many do not. It also doesn't help that the Certified ScrumMaster® people will put so much emphasis on smoothness and consistency, and when it doesn't happen there's always someone/something to blame. When you remove the context (like team lead who knows what happened) and put it in a quarterly chart for upper management, you get a lot of bad and counter-productive conclusions.