Psssst! I Can Get You Fixed Cost AND Fixed Dates!!
I have an offer you can’t refuse…
You don’t have to be afraid, just because I am Sicilian.
I am talking about Product Development here, not “garbage collection”.
I know it frustrates you that all this Agile stuff talks about uncertainty and fluffy stuff. I have a secret for you, however. It’s one of the most overlooked aspects of Agile. I will even let you in on this secret for absolutely FREE.
Here it goes…
In Scrum, there are fixed timeboxes or iterations we call Sprints. You probably knew that. However, what you probably didn’t realize is that if your Scrum Teams establish fanatical discipline and rigor around only releasing things that are in line with their strong and comprehensive Definition of Done every Sprint, you will have…
FIXED DELIVERY DATES!!!
What will undermine this is if they compromise on the various criteria in the DoD, effectively cutting corners and introducing risk into the product. Also, if they extend the Sprints, change the duration repeatedly, or have nonsensical practices like magical mystery Sprints where hardening, innovation, and planning suddenly take place then all bets are off in terms of having…
FIXED DELIVERY DATES!!!
So, let the Scrum Teams be responsible and empowered to make the critical decisions that no one else can truly and effectively make. They will make the product sound in accordance with changing customer needs and technological advancements by baking quality in, integrating along the way, practicing emergent design, improving by coming up with new ideas, and doing smaller increments of ongoing planning, as Scrum intended. The result will be…
FIXED DELIVERY DATES!!!
Now, we all know that a Development Team in Scrum is supposed to be 5-9 (7±2) people, right? If we use a blended rate of, say, $100k to represent the average salary for team members (including consultants), then we know for certain that a Development Team will cost $500-900k / year. Voila! We have…
FIXED COSTS!!
Now, we can figure out what a Sprint costs by doing simple division. Let’s say a Sprint is two weeks. That gives us ~$19,000-$35,000 / Sprint depending on the Development Team size. Further, let’s assume our releases are every 3 Sprints (6 weeks). Now we know that a release costs us ~$57,000-105,000. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s…
FIXED COSTS!!!
You can’t ask for more!!
No, I mean literally, you can NOT ask for more; like Fixed Scope, for instance. In order to get fixed costs and fixed delivery dates in Scrum, the trade-off here is that the Scope is flexible. This is good, don’t freak out.
Having flexible scope ensures that we are able to roll with the punches and change as customer needs change, technology changes, and most importantly, business priorities change. To help us with this, we want the Sprints to be as short as possible. If we have one week Sprints, then we can formulate smaller increments in planning and ultimately have very granular refinements in our strategy rather than very drastic course corrections which are costly.
We still have higher level elements of planning that map to overall strategy: Vision, Roadmap, Release level planning, and insisting upon a Sprint Goal for every Sprint. This helps to keep us on target and focused with our longer term strategy.
So, not having fixed scope is a good thing. We could still have releases that are structured around fixed scope instead of fixed delivery dates. But it’s simply not realistic or REAL WORLD to expect to have more than one element fixed, one element firm, and one element flexible from among Scope, Cost, and Time. Those who demand to have all three fixed (so-called “firm fixed price”) are best served in taking this up by seeking an audience with OZ in the Emerald City, since they are indeed in fantasy land…
So, there it is:
FIXED DELIVERY DATES and FIXED COSTS
Happy weekend!
Peace and blessings-
Daniel