David A Barrett
2004-10-29 13:19:05 UTC
I have a situation that I'm hoping the list can help me with.
We're a small team (4 people) doing development work for internal business
units. Of necessity, each of our Scrums need to address a number of
different projects and one-off items for a variety of departments. We do
our best to keep the departments focused on strategic goals, and we find
that this is working very well.
Here's the problem. We've got a project coming down the pipe that we've
known about for some time. This project involves outside business partners
and has been mired in contract negotiations, internal executive approval
process and the like for some time now. We have an idea of the scope of
the project, but only restricted access to necessary outside technical
resources until the contracts are signed. We're reluctant (refuse) to
start work on this project prior to final approval, even if we could start
now (which we probably couldn't). Our current Sprint ends November 12th.
We are likely to find out that project has a formal go ahead sometime next
week, and they would like to be in a position to do some restricted
implementation by December 1st.
The quantity of work feels do-able in that time (possibly). It doesn't
feel do-able in the time from November 15th to December 1st. We don't want
Scrum to become a "bondage and discipline" methodology that gets in the way
of IT being an "enabler" of business initiatives. On the other hand, we
are extremely happy with the results we get from Scrum and like idea of
being able to say, "We have a system, it works, and if you want our help
you'll need to play by our rules". We don't want to jettison the
methodology this time, because that sends the message that we're willing to
jettison the methodology and the business unit involved will keep bringing
up projects in the future that won't fit into our Sprint schedule.
In the course, Ken paints this as a rather black and white picture. If the
customers start to get silly and messing around with the process, you call
a Premature Termination of Sprint, nobody gets anything and you start all
over. In our mixed bag Sprints, though, this would penalize the other
internal business units.
So, the question: How can I handle this situation, get the work done by
December 1, and still preserve some adherence to Scrum principles?
Dave Barrett,
Lawyers' Professional Indemnity Company
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We're a small team (4 people) doing development work for internal business
units. Of necessity, each of our Scrums need to address a number of
different projects and one-off items for a variety of departments. We do
our best to keep the departments focused on strategic goals, and we find
that this is working very well.
Here's the problem. We've got a project coming down the pipe that we've
known about for some time. This project involves outside business partners
and has been mired in contract negotiations, internal executive approval
process and the like for some time now. We have an idea of the scope of
the project, but only restricted access to necessary outside technical
resources until the contracts are signed. We're reluctant (refuse) to
start work on this project prior to final approval, even if we could start
now (which we probably couldn't). Our current Sprint ends November 12th.
We are likely to find out that project has a formal go ahead sometime next
week, and they would like to be in a position to do some restricted
implementation by December 1st.
The quantity of work feels do-able in that time (possibly). It doesn't
feel do-able in the time from November 15th to December 1st. We don't want
Scrum to become a "bondage and discipline" methodology that gets in the way
of IT being an "enabler" of business initiatives. On the other hand, we
are extremely happy with the results we get from Scrum and like idea of
being able to say, "We have a system, it works, and if you want our help
you'll need to play by our rules". We don't want to jettison the
methodology this time, because that sends the message that we're willing to
jettison the methodology and the business unit involved will keep bringing
up projects in the future that won't fit into our Sprint schedule.
In the course, Ken paints this as a rather black and white picture. If the
customers start to get silly and messing around with the process, you call
a Premature Termination of Sprint, nobody gets anything and you start all
over. In our mixed bag Sprints, though, this would penalize the other
internal business units.
So, the question: How can I handle this situation, get the work done by
December 1, and still preserve some adherence to Scrum principles?
Dave Barrett,
Lawyers' Professional Indemnity Company
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/9EfwlB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
To Post a message, send it to: ***@eGroups.com
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Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
scrumdevelopment-***@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
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