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Is it good to follow Scrum on Fixed price or Fixed duration projects?

Last post 03:10 pm November 22, 2021 by Balaji Dhamodaran
3 replies
09:25 am November 19, 2021

As we welcome the changing requirements in scrum, how to handle this situation if we are working on Fixed duration projects, say of 6 months?

If we have any INCREASED scope during the project which will EXTEND projects committment beyond 6 month, how scrum master should handle this situation?


10:55 am November 19, 2021

If you have a fixed-duration effort of 6 months, then increased scope wouldn't extend the effort beyond 6 months. If you were to order the work and work in priority order, it means that some work will not be complete. Using Scrum would give the stakeholders usable product Increments after every Sprint, extreme visibility into the work that is likely to be complete (especially with flow metrics like throughput), and the ability to make early decisions on descoping work or extending the duration to include the increased scope.

Similarly, fixed-price efforts work in a similar way. It depends on if the fixed-price is for the team alone or includes material and tools for the product. A stable cross-functional team has a stable price of labor that can be easily predicted. This effectively turns into a fixed-duration effort. You may be able to extend the effort by reducing the size of the team, but that would likely reduce the work that can be done. The same core ideas apply, though: visibility into the work can let stakeholders make informed decisions at regular intervals to maximize their value.


01:52 pm November 19, 2021

As we welcome the changing requirements in scrum, how to handle this situation if we are working on Fixed duration projects, say of 6 months?

In Scrum each Sprint is a fixed duration project, and hence you may reasonably allow for at least 6 of them to bring this complex challenge under empirical control.

If we have any INCREASED scope during the project which will EXTEND projects committment beyond 6 month, how scrum master should handle this situation?

Projects don't make commitments, people do, and in Scrum they make them for themselves.

If making a commitment beyond a certain timeframe is unrealistic then this ought to be highlighted as early as possible.


03:10 pm November 22, 2021

I have experienced in FP contracts both in traditional model and iterative model. its is not only Scrum, No frameworks or methods can assure scope completion by the date agreed.I am not sure why the heads doing contracts are still having that illusion and committing for fixed scope in fixed date. Even for a sprint, the commitment can be done only for the sprint goal and not the sprint backlog. SM can help the organisation to understand this fact.

 

 


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