How to know the number of sprints to deliver an IT project ?
Hi all,
I'm an old Project Manager that start his conversion to become a Scrum Master. In my new organisation, all is about predictive, Scrum has been introduced recently and for me, to start a new project from scratch I need to know how much scrum should the scrum team perform to deliver the project.
In my lecture, I learned that the velocity will be adjusted as the team learn and adapt from the previous sprint, I understand that, but for my organisation, we still need a predictive planning to start a project, the execution phase could be within sprints.
Thanks a lot for your help
In my new organisation, all is about predictive, Scrum has been introduced recently
I'd suggest that if Scrum had been introduced, this would no longer be the case. Scrum is about establishing empiricism under complex conditions and becoming predictable rather than predictive.
The first step to introducing Scrum is the realization that the organization will need to change, and the higher-ups need to communicate a sense of urgency for this to happen.
On the spectrum from predictive to adaptive, Scrum is closer to the adaptive side. By choosing to adopt Scrum, or nearly any agile method, the organization is saying that it is better to be adaptive to a changing environment than trying to predict what is happening and accounting for the likely possibilities. If you aren't going to be adaptive, Scrum would add a lot of adaption points that would be overhead to a predictive organization. Although some planning up-front is good, you should abandon big-planning-up-front and take a more iterative, incremental, and adaptive approach.
Scrum framework can enable the teams to predict the product/service to meet the market expectation by executing in iterations but not to predict a strict end time for entire scope. If your organisation wants to pre plan the end timeline and use Scrum for execution, there are chances the teams, stakeholders to blame Scrum as not right fit for them as it may not be fully leveraged to its intended purpose.
Starting with a Product goal to achieve in a timeframe and allocating a flexible budget for that target could be good start. About velocity, that is a different topic to debate.