Many Delivery Teams should ‘declare a new epoch’ on their velocity or throughput

It has been 25 years since we survived the Y2K apocalypse. For those of us who worked on remediation throughout 1999, we know how real the threat felt and how much time and effort was invested minimizing the impact. I spent New Years Eve 1999 in a server room, watching racks of equipment running Solaris, Windows, MacOS, OpenVMS, and Netware roll-over to ensure they still worked — carefully taking backups before-and-after midnight in case something went haywire.

To support the Y2K transition, Netware 4.12 added a feature: “Repair time stamps and declare new epoch“. I wonder if the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age was as easy as running ‘dsrepair’ on civilization?

My purpose writing this isn’t a stroll down memory lane – many of us remember what “work” was like before March of 2020, and can enumerate many changes as we shifted to telework. In 2025, as many organizations are making a hard-pivot toward return-to-office, what I see in all of my clients is not just the moving parts of accommodating everyone in the office, or the impact to their personal lives (deja vu – all over again), but impacts to productivity: lower throughput or velocity, and misestimation as a result of it.

I have started encouraging my clients to declare a new epoch – to recognize that their teams velocity will be changing, in many cases that their team’s composition will be changing (Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development). If your metrics go back to 2019, establish a baseline prior to March 2020, and another between March of 2020 and January of 2025. For this year, start to look at things with fresh eyes, and while you may try and hold to the norms from the prior epoch, start to collect data and build a case for what velocity is since return-to-office. They may have no influence or authority over where the work takes place, but they should honestly reflect their teams current capacity. The goal isn’t to make the narrative “here is how little we get done since return-to-office” but “here is how much work we are able to currently deliver”.

How this gets done in teams varies a lot, whether they are using an Agile methodology like Scrum or Kanban, or their output is measured in other ways. I’m not one to prescribe how teams and organizations do this, I often make recommendations, but in nearly 20 years of consulting across sectors everyone does some form of this. Don’t reinvent the how, use what you have to tell the story of productivity in the current epoch and focus on what is working well.

Most importantly: take care of yourself.