If you’re ever in a SAFe team, one of the tenants is that annual reviews are useless. It pushes for doing constructive reviews every PI (approximately quarterly).
For estimation, hours is a good measure, even more so when there are external consultants that get paid by the hour.
Developer velocity can be measured by tasks/features completed compared to the estimate.
Could you elaborate on why story points are useful or perhaps point to some resources on the topic ?
Otherwise, somebody ends up trying to convert story points into hours and that's not what it's there to measure.
I wrote extensively about this a couple of years ago before I found out about SAFe itself.
https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-developme...
There was an expectation that devs complete about 8 points a sprint. I don't know if the eight point target is common, but SAFe does talk about comparing story points across teams.
> At scale, it becomes difficult to predict the story point size for larger epics and features when team velocities can vary wildly. To overcome this, SAFe teams initially calibrate a starting story point baseline where one story point is defined roughly the same across all teams.
...
> Give every developer-tester on the team eight points for a two-week iteration
One thing is you need 100% collocated experienced people who know what they are doing - no third party agencies who spend 15 mins discussing pixel separation in photoshop mock-ups.
It also not something you'd carelessly throw a junior or an intern into
It’s supposed to be getting out of the way of developers.
I've loved it at my company. It seems like development best practices + sanity enforcement outside of it and it's fairly flexible too (we use kanban instead of scrum).
It's done wonders for putting the planning of how things should be implemented into the hands of developers themselves and then essentially gets out of the way.
Secondly, and more relevantly and importantly, I'm about to walk into a shooting match to defend my employees' performances against a larger pool. And what I need in that battle are bullets. The more bullets I have, the more successful I will be. So load up my gun with every single bullet you can think of!