Project Management With Other Priorities

Question

We are looking to start a new product development project. We like the idea of a scrum board, but we are unsure if this will work for our development structure. Our development team is also our support team, so we can not dedicate 100% of our time to the new development project. Since we can not have complete focus, it seems inevitable that our sprints will have issues that will need to be carried over to the next sprint.

This process will look as if we are not completing our project to plan. Has anyone else had an issue similar to ours? We are looking for a way to narrow the list of tasks to work on (sprint style), without having a negative impact when sprints complete with open tasks.

Marcin Żurawiecki · Answer

Hello @bryanradke,

We are working in Scrum framework for a while and we had similar problems. For example some members of our team couldn't work for 100% of their time in the project or we couldn't predict the hot fixes that just had to be done during the sprint. It seems that those things can affect your sprint estimation and it's true. But only to certain extent. In your first sprints you will surely have issues and probably make overcommitments. However in the long term, after a few sprints your velocity will be set as an average for those few iterations and you will be able to estimate your sprint backlog better. If the support is a part of your daily work, it means that it will be counted in your velocity also. Far more important is to have a consistent team, because you improve together and can establish your velocity on a certain, constant level.

To sum it up - just try the Scrum framework and see how it goes. You will improve from sprint to sprint and finally you won't have the problem of incompleted issues on your retrospective meeting. One more remark - don't do any quasi-Scrum practices. It only works well if you perform all the meetings, sprints are regular, you have all the roles in your team required etc. Only full version Scrum works, not the demo :)