If organisation or product development is very chaotic then this factor will remain on extreme left like 0.6 or may be below. Going beyond 0.8 can be risky and can derail teams too. Retrospect on this in coming sprints to see if you want to increase focus factor marginally and fine tune, iterate this factor as you go, to reach sustainable pace/Flow. I prefer to start a team on successful note(improves morale). Using lesser focus factor when you start fresh and then if team meets sprint goals early, then they can take up more in the current sprint.

Team is less matured, needs lot of handholding and so on….

Team is working on a complex product or new to technology domain.I use lesser focus factor(say 0.6) on the following situations: Team will take on the stories till the time all the tasks sum to not more than 240 hours(in this example). Divide those stories into tasks as shown below and estimate each task for hours. Teams take top priority stories from the backlog as per ordering done by PO. Now this 240 hours of work is what the team can take up in the current sprint. In this example, applying focus factor say 0.6, then this team real capacity will be 400*0.6 = 240 hours.

This is the effective hours you can expect from the team. After multiplying total capacity with focus factor you get real capacity against which you can make sprint commitments or forecasting. Traditionally, project managers used 6-6.5 hours as planned hours in a day for project execution. Focus factor is teams ability to remain focussed on the sprint goals without any other distractions. I prefer to use Focus Factor (F.F) on this total capacity to arrive at real capacity for sprint commitments/forecasting. Then to what capacity team can commit for? How can team make this sprint planning effective? It will lead to team working over time, rushing towards the end, quality cuts and low team morale. Planning for this total capacity will be disaster. Say team is of 5 people, then total capacity assuming 8 hour day, 2 weeks sprint(10 days) is = 5*8*10 = 400 hours. Team capacity is calculated as per people availability in that sprint. For you to commit to a sprint goal, you need to know current team capacity. I ask teams to do commitment driven planning during early stages of scrum adoption. How many stories can we commit in this sprint? How to plan for the team capacity? During sprint planning, scrum teams often face this challenge of sprint commitments.

Scrum team