Obsession With Commitment Matching Velocity

The Fine Line Between Risk Mitigation And Falling Back Into Covering Your Butt
The team hasn’t met its commitments once. Not once.
The atmosphere was becoming thicker by the minute. The management was displeased with the progress of the project and was looking for answers, staring at a bunch of Jira charts, I prepared earlier. “How can we claim that we are working in Scrum mode, if the team is not sticking with the rules?”
Throughout the majority of projects I have been working on I could observe an obsession with burn-down charts and other Scrum metrics, mainly team commitments. And as a consequence, a side product of backlog grooming, estimation and sprint planning is elevated to the most important management indicator that “Agile” works: The team’s commitment is matching or outperforming its average velocity.
Scrum: The Obsession With Commitment Matching Velocity – Hands-on Agile by Age of Product
While I do see its value when it comes to risk mitigating—when can X probably be delivered to the customers—, the emphasis on its reporting value escapes me. It’s all playing safe again, corporate style, when it should be about delivering great software that is valuable, usable and feasible.
Why A Team’s Velocity Is Volatile Per Se
There are so many factors that make any team’s velocity volatile per se:
New team members being onboard,
Other team members leaving,
Seniority levels,
Working in unchartered territory,
Working on legacy code, probably undocumented,
Running into unexpected technical debt,
Holiday