Scope management, a retrospective

In my last post, I wrote about some of the issues my team is having around scope management and demand intake. It's been a while since the sprint in question, so it's definitely worth an update.

We're about two sprints past the one in question and during the retrospective for the bad sprint, this topic definitely came up. As a team, it's a bit of a sensitive topic; demand management and intake is a hard thing for us to perform successfully for a multitude of reasons.

During our retrospective, I raised the topic of scope management and asked a question around demand intake (regardless of whether or not it was an enhancement, defect, or spike). The examples from the current sprint were defects created for UAT and added mid-sprint, so we started with the company guidance around handling defects that arise during a sprint.

The recommendation from Southwest Airlines for defects is that they immediately be pulled into the active sprint for triage and analysis and that they fall from sprint to sprint until they have been resolved.

I definitely understand the reasoning behind the recommendation; our leaders want production defects to be triaged and resolved as quickly as possible. You're trading the integrity of the sprint by adding defects mid-sprint, but if you're OK with that trade-off, then more power to you.

After restating that guideline, there was more discussion around what other contributing factors may play into our scope management problems. We still have some discord around handling new intake and unplanned work, with the continued argument about quality customer service vs. focusing on sprint commitments.

In the end, a general urge to do better around scope management was gained, and we're not 100% better, we're getting there.