Investigating Fixed-Duration Agile Projects

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

When I was speaking to a group recently, I mentioned that you could have fixed-duration agile projects. It’s a common misnomer that agile projects are always open ended. While in many cases that’s the desired model, it doesn’t have to be that way.

There is no reason why an agile initiative cannot be restricted to a certain number of sprints and then considered complete. The solution at the end of that last sprint has to represent at least a minimally viable product (MVP) for the project to be considered successful, but work can still be halted if that is felt to be the best approach.

Many organizations prefer to cut off agile work after a certain point has been reached in the backlog, equating that to a set duration, but that’s rather different. To stay true to agile principles, the backlog may need to be reprioritized, effectively moving the cutoff line. And of course, if estimates are not as accurate as believed, or team velocity is different from expectations, the actual number of sprints needed to get to that cutoff point can vary considerably.

However, there are legitimate examples of when a fixed completion date might be used. Software that has to ship as part of a physical product for example (it doesn’t preclude further work from being carried out later to update and distribute). Or, as was the example of someone who contacted me, …

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