Or “How do we deliver to a fixed price contract?”

Or “Why do we do delivery in priority order?”

When you move to an agile approach, a lot of people worry about how we delivery to scope. We are very used to planning all our work upfront and then working to meet that plan. An agile approach seems very strange (and concerning) because we change the plan based on feedback.

The fallacy with the traditional approach is that we expect able to get the plan correct in the first instance. As most work we do is “new” (in others words we are doing it the first time) and we are not making 1000 copies of the same thing, then we also know that this planned approach may not make the most sense - we are only pretending that we can know everything at the beginning of the work. The reality is that if we want happy customers we want (as Jim Highsmith says) to delivery what the customer wants at the end of the project, not what they thought they wanted at the beginning of the project.

So how do we “control scope”?

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