In our latest Agile Surgery session, our team of looked at the gap between the textbook and reality. The team identified some typical real-world Sprint challenges and tactics we can use to handle these situations effectively. The session covered Testing, Fake News and Shifting Scope and Priorities (with lots in between). The Agile Surgeries are always designed to be interactive and so ‘you asked, and we answered’.
Below is a summary of some of the questions and insights from the team:
The organisation I work for preferS to plan future work (in excess of TWO future sprints) according to existing capacity. What is the attitude of the panel to this type of approach?
As a headline this is great! But digging into the story behind this a bit more: it can be difficult to manage stakeholders when they want to plan to a minute level of detail very far in advance but this can be tackled by taking the stakeholders on the journey with us as we shape and plan our delivery.
At the start of the delivery we produce epics and provide t-shirt size estimates upon which we can base our outline forecast. Is this 100% accurate? No. Is it useful? Yes.
As we move through our delivery, we learn as a team and ideally our velocity ramps up and we begin to understand what the team can achieve and what is sustainable. From this, we can use the average velocity from the previous Sprints to plan going forwards and see how this impacts our initial outline forecast and end delivery date. This is all about using the information we have today to predict as accurately as we about the future.
If we outline this approach to our stakeholders, they will be more likely to be accepting of any changes, as opposed to being surprised by what they may view as slippage at the 11th hour. If, for example, on our plan we think it will take us four Sprints to address the riskiest areas of the delivery.We'll tell the stakeholders this to pre-empt any fluctuations we can explain today. Finally, make use of any tools at your disposal. If you have Jira use the version report to track movement in your planned delivery date and explain any key events which have impacted this.