Feedback from Daniel Eales

[Jim Ewel]

Hi Jim,

Congratulations on nearing the publication of your book!

I implemented a sprint approach in my team a couple of years ago with a view to become more agile. I’ve definitely seen benefits in our productivity and focus. I implemented month-long sprints to give us time to pick up tasks. However, I’d say my two challenges are:

How to manage longer-term projects in this sprint model (ie it can be demoralising seeing items run over into the next month)
This may be down to how we balance projects and BAU to ensure we have allocated enough time to complete projects in the month, as well as breaking those project down.
How we manage the expectations of colleagues and line managers to ensure we take things out of the sprint if new priorities arise
This may be down to how we get buy-in to the sprint format from these persons

Kind regards,

Dan

[Jim Ewel]

Daniel,

Thanks for the feedback. I cover a few things in the book that might be useful for your two issues:

Managing longer-term projects that bleed over in to the next Sprint
Have you considered Scrumban? I don’t mean the mashup of Scrum and Kanban that most people mean, but the formally defined Scrumban? Instead of something bleeding over into the next Sprint, it handles items that aren’t finished at the “end of the Sprint” (I put it in quotes, because actually, there isn’t really a Sprint) by continuing the work on them and getting them done as quickly as possible. The other solution that some teams use is to break down deliverables in to smaller chunks and deliver “early and often” to both get feedback and to satisfy those impatient users.

Managing perceptions
This is always an issue. I don’t know why, but although people don’t like it, they’re more accepting of it from developers than marketers. Part of the reason is that there really are marketing opportunities that can’t wait. One way that I cover handling this in the book is to pre-allocate 10-15% of your capacity during a Sprint to the unexpected, so that you don’t have to take something out when you add something. If nothing comes up, and you finish the Sprint early, you can always pull things off the backlog and get them done.

I hope that helps,

Jim

[Author]

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