What University Degrees Teach Us About Sprints

At a new client, POs and managers routinely over-commit sprints, make changes midway, and roll a bunch of work to the next sprint.

Sounds easy to fix, right?

Let’s say they get a better handle on estimates, true velocity, mid-sprint changes, and team commitment. They accurately plan and fully execute every sprint.

Many people think that’s how you get agile. However, while this might result in more frequent delivery, it won’t necessarily produce agility.

There’s a prime example of that, and I’ve been living it for a few years through my kids: getting a university degree.

That’s a project with a lot of carefully planned time-boxes. The total duration is 3 or 4 years; courses are time-boxed (semester length is fixed); every course has sprints — date-bound assignments. In degrees like mine (math & comp sci) those sprints were weekly. My kids are in creative degrees and their sprints are 2-4 weeks apart with weekly milestones.

This setup has zero agility. There’s an established curriculum, and everyone must go through it. The time-boxing helps prevent two kinds of scope creep: courses needing to take longer, and course topics crowding out other topics. In fact, the time-boxing helps prevent adaptation.

What about value to the students? It can be good if the profs’ plans work out well. But if students struggle with a topic and need time for assignments, there’s no flex, unless you count the joy of pulling all-nighters.

We like to think that time-boxing catalyzes agility. This example shows that time-boxing can be irrelevant for agility. The crux is how you use it.

At a university, they use it with a fixed, fully laid out, long backlog. Time-boxes merely chip away at it on a cadence.

It doesn’t have to be the same way where you work. Keep your backlog on the shorter side, with items that are mostly might-do rather than will-do, and with more details on the near-future items than on the later ones. If you do use sprints, plan them by asking “What’s the best we can do next?”. That there will get you good agility.