Align Sprints with Fiscal Quarters
In this article, we will explore grouping agile sprints into four groups that align with the corporate fiscal reporting periods, allowing for easier reporting by Steering Committees to The Board, and having each of the four groups align with your corporate OKR's.
Scaled agile typically recommends grouping sprints into five program increments. I am advocating for grouping your sprints into four program increments and aligning the timing of those program increments to your fiscal reporting and board reporting needs. My recommendation is to keep your sprint sat two-weeks each, but increase the number of sprints in a program increment to map to your fiscal quarters. The whole company should be on the same sprint schedule, whether it is the Sales department, Accounting department, etc. As an example, if your fiscal year was identical to the calendar year in 2024, you would have the following company-wide sprint calendar:
Your corporate OKRs (i.e., objectives and key results) identify your annual goals by focus area, such as brand, culture, revenue, services, etc. Those annual corporate goals at the organizational level flow down to team/department goals. Achieving those goals may require undertaking of software projects. Those software projects should tie directly to those departmental and organizational goals on a quarterly basis. As such, project Steering Committees responsible for those software projects should be reporting to The Board on their quarterly schedule on how they are trying to meet those OKR's with their projects and the status of those projects.
At the beginning of each quarter, you would undertake your program increment planning event. In that event you would state what software features you will try and accomplish in those seven sprints, tied to the quarter, that align with the OKR's. After you identified the features that you will tackle in your software project for that program increment, you will then align the user stories to the seven sprints as well.
What did your department do this fiscal quarter to contribute to the overall organizational OKR's for the year? Well, you should be able to state what software features you released in that program increment, as part of your software project because you gave yourself the quarterly deadline for particular features, and this all aligns to your sprint calendar.
Happy software engineering everyone!
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