Agile Scoping — Your Questions Answered
Agile Scoping — Your Questions Answered
Since writing the agile scoping blog, I have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback received. Moreover, I have had several questions about the model.
During this blog, I want to answer those questions which I hope will make it more valuable for you.
Agile scoping sounds great, but I very rarely work with a client at the start of their agile journey, so this won’t work for me?
I have personally found the need for scoping to be more crucial in this situation.
Best case the scoping has been completed and all I need to do is have some quick conversations so that I understand the outcomes, and can continue with ongoing scoping. (I have not experienced this myself)
Worst case it is my opportunity to get some quick wins under my belt by helping the client define what outcomes are important to them, and to start to measure this. The agile journey continues while the scoping is going on, so the cost is relatively low to the client.
The other suggestion when joining an agile journey in the middle is to be careful not to say or indicate that what has happened so far in the change is terrible. But to see it as an opportunity to retrospect on the journey so far, and make some adaptations.
Agile scoping in my mind is an ongoing activity that changes and pivots as we learn more.
I can see how this works for large clients, but isn’t it a bit of an overhead for small companies?
Agile scoping should be scalable to any size organisation. The size of the scoping is likely to depend on the outcomes the client is looking for and how aligned everyone is towards the desired outcomes.
The size and shape of agile scoping is likely to be different in every organisation. Still, ultimately we need to have a direction of travel even if it is expected to change as we discover more.
As a ScrumMaster of one Scrum Team, I still need to understand what good looks like? What outcomes are expected by the stakeholders, and if the team are aligned with the expected results being asked for.
In this situation, scoping might be easy and take a few days. However, we might also find that the outcomes are not in the team’s control; then we have the opportunity early on to go back and explore extending the scope or changing the outcomes to something else.
As a general rule, if the organisation can afford to hire you (Permanent or Contract), The overhead of carrying out scoping is likely to be a no brainer.
Having a coaching plan doesn’t sound very agile?
The content of the coaching plan will be covered in a later article, for now, see this as a compass covering the direction of the travel, and some ideas on how to get there that has been co-created. If the course of travel changes, then we throw away the plan and start again with initial scoping.
How do I do scoping as an internal coach?
The agile scoping approach is agnostic of being internal or external. You might use initial scoping when working with a new area of the organisation, when a stakeholder changes, or if the priorities of the organisation change.
I am often asked, how do I show my value as an agile coach? This is the crucial difference as using scoping you can align any outcomes with the performance reviews you are probably still filling in. I will write about this in later articles.
Why won’t you work with less mature clients?
My approach or thought process is not about maturity. It is however about the ability for me to feel I can add more value to the client than they are paying me. It could be a client very early on in their journey who wants to understand more about what difference agile can make, or a very experienced client who is looking for that next step.
I find that the answer to your initial scoping question has changed a lot over the last 18 months, is that normal?
Organisations change all the time; that is what makes them so complex. Scoping is a constant activity for this reason. We can, however, look for some signs during the early stages of scoping to see if what they say and what they do align. For example, if the client says during initial scoping they have self-managing teams, you could ask “and when you have self-managing teams, what will I see and hear?” I can then check this during organisational scoping.
How do you say no to a client without hurting their feelings?
Often due to the reflective nature of the initial scoping phase, the client has some realisations already that they are not going to be able to achieve what they want or I am not going to be able to help them with their goal. If I do turn down a client and it is a surprise, I would use the clean feedback model along with the offer of a followup call.