Enhance Scope

Constraints are a very important part of working in an agile or lean system.

I discussed timeboxing as one possible constraint at length in previous posts. The two other constraints that we use in our projects are fixed resources and "minimum scope".

Scope is one of the most crucial things to manage in an agile environment and that is a very tricky thing to do. If the scope of a set of items that need to be delivered in a cycle (sprint, in SCRUM language) is not flexible, there will be trouble because the team is not able to handle too many constraints and still deliver within the defined timebox, using the allocated resources.

Let's make an example. The team gets an assignment in a cycle (sprint) to deliver a mailing to 100 clients, and the backlog (see below) for this cycle (sprint) contains 5 items. Each item is described in a story from a client perspective and in "definition of done" the minimum scope is explained.

As you can see, the minimum scope defines what is needed for the champ (product owner) to ship the product to the customer, and the champ has also added ideas how scope could be expanded or enhanced if the team has more time. But the team will get a "done" for each item if they deliver the minimum scope, not the enhanced scope. The column "enhance scope" can also be left out and the team will decide for themselves how to expand scope if they have time and resources to do so.

The interesting thing about this idea is that teams get more motivated if they receive a basic scope goal and can then overachieve rather than getting a goal that is too high and then having to reduce the scope or worse, use more time to achieve the scope described. Overtime is not a concept that fits agile principles. On the contrary, the team has to constantly navigate the issues of time, resources and scope in order to get a good result and a "done" for every item. This means that tough choices have to be made, which means that ideally, good conversations happen.

This also means that the role of the facilitator is very important if the team wants to work well and without stress. Also, a team that works well will always balance customer value (the "story" part of the backlog) and team satisfaction and base all trade-offs on those two criteria.