One-week sprint...shut up and take my money…
You don’t need to be Jeff Patton, or Marty Cagan to hear a team member say, “Due to the several ceremonies we have had during the week, we couldn’t finish with what was committed for this sprint.”
The Same discussion took place over and over again working with different teams, and they continue sating, “We should change to two-week-sprints instead of one in order to finish our tasks on time.”, I always drop the same opinion: “One-week-sprint is the best way to experience the floating poop rightaway…”.
Tic-tac..time flies. Just right after the sprint planning, sometimes you can hear up in the air the the words of David Gilmour in his song Time “The time is gone, the song is over…Thought I have something more to say…”. Indeed, review is coming…and you start asking yourself, but wait sprint started when?…yesterday?. Unfinished stories, unprepared reviews, a new client, new business, no time to learn. A continuos race of each member again theirselves.
But If you look closer, the lessons learned during those first weeks are invaluable. There is no room for bullshit, only high performance teams enjoy the sweet success in those conditions. Looking even closer, after a couple of sprints team members commonly quickly realize they have problems, and the only way to succeed is to adapt. Communication starts to improve, purposeful time-boxed meetings and the focus improves. The team starts to identify problems ahead, so impact can be controlled and reduced. Why?, because it is a team that was built to learn quickly.
Be sure to have a good inspection process, a retro will do the job. A team that is continuously learning, it is a team that is valuable not only for a client, but for the organization.
In the blue corner, two-week-sprints, cycles are obviously longer, and team members tend to think that they will have more time to develop. FALSE!, “More time you just said..?, great we can do more”. Ceremonies will be naturally extended, and the problems will be similar, but the main difference is that the learning cycles are not taking place so often, so sometimes, valuable lessons may be forgotten in a similar form of an old slack message.
Being that said, it is really important to consider that at the time to decide which one fits better for your team and product, one week-sprint is not for anybody, you and your team need to adapt fast.
It is also important to highlight that the end of a sprint is not a deadline, it is a chance to learn. Collect feedback, and evaluate to then keep doing and recognize what you’re doing right, and stop doing what you’re doing wrong. So what’s best than having more cycles like these?. You need to push you to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, experiment, inspect + adapt, measure and learn, that is where good stories are born and raised.
Key Takeaways
Set the stage with your team first
In one week loops, you need to take decisions fast. A team that is empowered, has the confidence and trust each other to take decisions as a whole. If everything goes well, success is shared across the team, if everything goes wrong, it is on the team too.
Keep looking all the risk indicators.
As cycles shorten, risk is everywhere. Lack on velocity, unfinished tasks that can impact on quality are just a few examples. As a product representative, you are the pilot of an aircraft, be sure to use all the tools you have handy to identify problems quickly.
Better sizing
Quicker iterations will push you to think on smaller chunks of potential shippable work. In consequence, will guide the team to work on smaller stories, sized accordingly.
Mind having more productive meetings
The past week a developer says “Folks, can we focus on the story?, we have 30 minutes to go..”.
Daily meetings, planning, review, retro, refinement, plus designing, developing, testing. All this cannot be possible if the team is not committed, engaged and clear on the outcomes of each iteration. Team meetings will tend organically to be more focused, purposeful, time-boxed, because team needs to be more and more productive.
Lastly, one-week sprints don’t bite, give them a try:
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