How do you reduce velocity for entire team per sprint

[Chris Flynn]

This is a Portfolio plugin question.

We use the Portfolio plugin to help implement SAFe. With SAFe you have a 2 to 3 day planning meeting once every 6 sprints. For that reason every 6th sprint you only plan half the team's velocity. Does anyone know how I could reduce the velocity of a sprint by x amount at the team level?

[Martin Suntinger]

Hi @Chris Flynn, you can't directly reduce the velocity for a future sprint, but you can work with either team member absences or global non-working days to achieve the same result: Portfolio live plans adjust sprint velocity in case of absences automatically (in standard plans, there is a checkbox in the velocity dropdown). If you want to reduce velocity by half, you could model absences for half of the sprint duration. If you don't have team members defined, the best way to still emulate this behavior is adding a single "placeholder" team member (virtual user), and model the absence there. Hope that works!

[Chris Flynn]

Thank you very much for the helpful tips. I will try out some combinations you recommended. I think I started by reducing work load for each team member during the sprint dates.