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Inability to Get a Product Launch Date in Scrum Environment
In our SCRUM environment, It is impossible to have an official Product Launch date that the project team can drive towards and deliver. Does SCRUM prevent us from having a product launch date that we can drive towards? My hunch is that this development team (IT and Product Manager) are having problems making the hard functionality inclusion/exclusion decisions and the PM is hiding behind this with Technology.
Many tech groups are confusing Scrum with "no planning." Scrum advocates a method called TimeBoxing that we have been teaching in Requirements That Work for years. Organize your work into a series of deliverables. Work on group 1 until completed, then begin work on group 2. In the Scrum world, that means that you give the team a backlog for group 1 (and not group 2) and they use as many sprints as the work takes. When group 1 is done, you give them the backlog for group 2. What's great about this technique is that you can add items to group 2 until you give it to development.
But what about release planning? You tell sales only about group 1 but you show marketing the potential items of groups 2 and 3 and 4. Even with Scrum, you can set a ship date and deliver what has been accomplished in the time frame. The flexibility of doing weekly or monthly sprints means that you can stop at any point and ship what is working.
Answered by Steve Johnson
