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Can a Sprint start date be dictated by the key stakeholders or business needs?

Last post 01:21 pm October 15, 2020 by Julia Jones
4 replies
11:20 am October 14, 2020

Hi,

Can somebody please clarify whether the key stakeholders or the business needs can dictate when a Sprint can occur? 

Does Scrum prohibit this practice? 

Thanks

 


05:17 pm October 14, 2020

The Scrum Guide states that:

A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint.

The Sprint is a container for events, such as Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, all of the work needed to develop the product Increment, the Sprint Review, and the Sprint Retrospective. In Scrum, there is no time that is outside of a Sprint. Once you start your first Sprint, each Sprint follows consecutively, with no breaks.

One thing that can happen, however, is changing the Sprint duration or length. Hopefully, this doesn't happen too often. However, it may come out that the chosen Sprint length isn't appropriate for synchronization and something else needs to happen. However, this doesn't change the fact that a new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint.


06:00 pm October 14, 2020

Can somebody please clarify whether the key stakeholders or the business needs can dictate when a Sprint can occur? 

There are no formal preconditions to Sprinting. What reason would they have for putting the establishment of empirical process control in delay?


07:44 pm October 14, 2020

To build on Thomas Owens' answer, where I work, we set the end/start of each Sprint around the combined needs of the Scrum Teams and stakeholders.

Specifically we hold the Sprint Review every 3 weeks on a Tuesday afternoon (Amsterdam time), in order to maximize participation of our various internal stakeholders (some of whom are usually based in the US), and are also typically busy at certain times of the week.

This doesn't change each sprint, but we did make a one-off adjustment to the length of a previous sprint, so we could get onto this regular end date.


01:15 pm October 15, 2020

Yes , good idea 


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