“ What I can measure is Sprint Velocity. It’s in the crapper the last 6 Sprints (two week Sprints). I’m having trouble (as a Scrum Master) figuring out why velocity is waning so bad with a veteran team. ”
The problem is that sprints are a horrible idea as an ongoing approach. They work great when you have a big project of high importance, but for the day in and day out stuff, it’s hard to sustain that. Think about it, who “sprints” every day, all day?
It’s another technique that it misused and will fall out of favor once the next shiney process gets a foothold, only to be misused, repeating the cycle.
The Kaizen/Agile approach is here to stay. No one actually “sprints”. Scrum as a methodology continues to grow. It’s not always the solution, but it is for ongoing enhancements that require frequent releases (we do at least one a week on an internal application). Waterfall methods are all but extinct in the very large company I work for. Agile has been around for 15 years and is being adopted by large organizations at a steady pace.