We Have a Hard Deadline - Can We Still Be Agile?

We Have a Hard Deadline — Can We Still Be Agile?

Do you need to deliver a lot by a fixed deadline?

Fixed deadlines and agility aren’t mutually exclusive.

Two of my multi-team clients face very real deadlines. They develop very different kinds of products, but their response to the constraint has been similar: prepare big up-front designs, huge backlogs, and story-level estimates.

However, their expensive planning hasn’t always worked out. And, they want to test early, respond to what they learn, and be adaptive. In other words, they want to be Agile about the work — even with a fixed date.

Is Agile thinking still helpful in this scenario?

Yes. Very much so.

Agile gives us principles that help teams deliver with less pain and less risk, even when there’s a real deadline.

Here are a few:

Have frequent decision points. You’re never far from the next opportunity to review what’s left, and you can see date risks far in advance. You also save time (lost to planning and wasted work) by deferring some decisions until you have better information.

What’s frequent? In many cases, one or two weeks. Not three or four.

Get to “done” on work items. This way, you don’t leave integration and quality surprises to the end (especially in multi-team setups!) If you need to cut scope, you won’t have wasted time on partially done work.

At one of those clients, the managers keep a Miro board that visualizes all the dependencies between the front-end, cloud, firmware, and hardware teams. It’s updated weekly and drives sprint planning.

Do the most important work in each cycle. Together with the previous two principles, this ensures that if time runs short, what’s left are the least important things.

This works even better if you use the testable → usable → lovable evolutionary path. That’s a different way to deliver features than merely bucketing them into “must have” and “nice to have.” It gives you real room to maneuver.

Focus on outcomes, not just features. In addition to contributing to better-fit products, this principle expands the space of possible solutions. You might need to do less work to achieve the same goals.

Test and learn early. Catch problems when there’s still time to fix them.

What to test? Assumptions, intentions, chosen solutions. Not just functionality and conformance to specs.

Fixed deadlines and agility aren’t mutually exclusive. Big up-front planning only works well if you truly have all the answers and they don’t change. If that’s not your situation, Agile can help you reduce schedule risk.