Scope

I'm finishing up the development stage of a project this week. It has been an interesting road with respect to scope. I was brought into the project after the start, actually 8 weeks into the project. When I got here, I looked at how much work was planned and became concerned. Without trying to validate the estimates, I felt there was more work than we could get done by the end of the project.

I worked with the team and client and we were able to reduce the scope by about 20%. Some of this was moving stories into the next release. Some was reducing the complexity of what we were trying to deliver.

As the project progressed, we added more scope. Not a surprise; it should be expected. As the users started seeing parts of the application, they thought of other things to ask for. But here's where we ran into a bit of a jam. We added new stories, but didn't take anything out. We assumed we could absorb the additional work; it only was a couple story points a week.

With about 4 weeks to go, as I looked at our velocity and how many points we had left, I saw we had a problem. When I brought this to the business, they said "we have to have all of this, you need to work harder." Two weeks later, the business saw what I was talking about, it just wasn't all going to get done.

The business identified some stories that could be moved out. The remaining work was still more than our average velocity, so I agreed I would work the team through the weekend to get the rest of the work done.  This was the first time I had asked the team to go above their normal work days, so I wasn't to concerned. If we had been 4 weeks out and expecting 4 weekends of work, I would have been concerned.

We got the work done. Our final tally was slightly higher than what I thought we could deliver right after we re-scoped the work. The real lesson to me is to make sure every time we add even a small amount of work, we make the client aware of how that can impact what we can deliver by the end of the project (their final delivery date couldn't be changed).