Holidays can be disruptive to scheduling, tracking, and planning. They can break team cadence. Dependencies within and across teams can be exaggerated when the number of working days in the Sprint is reduced. Additionally, teams that span international borders have another issue because not everyone has the same holiday scheduling. For example, it is common practice in many countries to bookend official days off with extra personal vacation days, so a two-day holiday often becomes four.
Over the years, through experimentation, I’ve come up with some best practices to adjust holiday scheduling to prevent team cadence disruptions and optimize Sprints even with time off.
Definitions:
Blocks: Something in the way of the team or an individual getting work done.
Impediments: A more sophisticated way of expressing a block. Impediments allow for the nuance of a work project not being completely halted but rather when something gets in the way of working most efficiently.
Going from Suck to Awesome
Suck – Lengthening the Sprint
Sucks a little less – Shortening the Sprint
Awesome – Leaving the Sprint schedule as is
Optimize Sprints Over the Holidays
When the Holiday occurs within the Sprint?
When the holiday occurs within a Sprint suggests the best way to adjust the Sprint to minimize team cadence disruption. For example, if the holiday occurs:
Near the Sprint Start Date: If the Sprint was previously scheduled to start on a holiday, there are two options: 1) start the Sprint as soon as the holiday is over, or 2) start the Sprint early. The advantage of starting the Sprint as soon as the holiday ends is that moving the start date a couple of days back is straightforward. The disadvantage is that the whole company will be doing the same thing with every other meeting. So, the first days back after the holiday will be jampacked with additional meetings, which can disrupt team cadence. The advantage of starting the Sprint early is that it allows team members to plan with everyone available. The disadvantage is that the team may be planning a new Sprint before the previous Sprint has been completed.
Near the Sprint End Date: If the Sprint was previously scheduled to end on a holiday, I would recommend ending it early. If the holiday is on the last day of the Sprint, then end one day early. If the holiday is on the second to last day of the Sprint, then end two days early. Holidays at the end of the Sprint are easier to deal with than holidays at the beginning of the Sprint.
In the Middle of the Sprint: If the holiday is right in the middle of the Sprint, don’t change anything. Just leave everything alone. You may notice your team, because of the planning and team cadence, is much more productive than other teams that aren’t as organized around the holidays.
Extended Holidays
When holidays are extended with teams that have multi-week Sprints, it may make sense to double the Sprint length. For example, the Christmas holiday in the U.S. bumps right into the New Year holiday. Many tech firms have several days off around Christmas, followed by a day or two off to celebrate the New Year. This often results in many people taking the non-holiday as personal time off, which leaves long stretches of the calendar with few employees, including stakeholders, at work. In these cases, planning a longer Sprint is simply more efficient.
The reason to double the Sprint is because if there is a one-week Sprint, a two-week Sprint allows the end of the first Sprint to be canceled and the beginning of the second Sprint to be canceled. No new meetings or meeting times must be found. It is much easier to cancel meetings than add them. If you have a two-week Sprint, then a four-week Sprint would have the same advantages. If you lengthen a two-week Sprint by one week, then all future Sprints must be re-calendared. Three-week Sprints should never be extended.
Make sure you have the planning meeting when everyone is still in town, and the stakeholders are available. Another option is to allow the team to have a “clean-up Sprint.” [I’ll have a future blog on non-feature-based Sprints. In the meantime, check out the section below on how to adjust the type of work.]
As covered in a previous blog post on Timeboxing vs. Feature Duration, I am not a fan of modifying the length of a Sprint. The scheduling is just too much work, which is especially true near any holiday.
International Teams
International teams pose a different challenge because everyone may not be on holiday at the same time. In general, with international teams, I would not skip the ceremonies. I have listed some ideas and thoughts below on approaches that can be taken. The second challenge with international teams is that paid time off tends to be much longer in other countries than in the U.S., not only for holidays but also for paternity and maternity leaves, sick time, various local holidays, etc.
If your company has generous time off or is subject to erratic work schedules, cross-training is not optional. It's necessary. There is a lot of value to a Sprint happening like clockwork—no matter what. Remember, removing impediments is a foundational value to Agile. Sprints not occurring on a regular and consistent schedule should be considered less than optimal because it’s much easier to keep momentum (and velocity) with frequent standups.
Adjusting the Type of Work
If the team knows many of its members or stakeholders will be missing for a significant portion of the Sprint, then finding work with low dependency levels is very helpful.
Here are some examples of types of work that shouldn’t require a lot of stakeholder input or cross-team participation:
Refactoring existing features. It’s often a challenge to find the time to refactor existing features, so take advantage of the downtime over the holidays.
Security enhancements. Keeping systems safe is a never-ending battle. When everyone is gone, it allows for more focus time, which may be required for security enhancements.
Performance enhancements. Getting your systems to run faster is great. An additional benefit—especially given how many systems are now hosted in the cloud—is that some performance modifications will reduce your overall cloud spend. Imagine the Chief Financial Officer coming back from a holiday and being treated to a lower cloud hosting bill.
Additional Considerations
Acknowledge that holidays can be stressful as everyone tries to wrap up their work before they’re out of the office for a few days or a few weeks. Remember to check in with the team on their stress levels. Before the Sprint that contains the holiday begins, work with the team to plan how the compressed Sprint will proceed. Consider skipping the retrospective and/or skipping the demo. Another option is to record the demo.
U.S. Holidays: In the U.S., holidays have mostly been shifted to Fridays and Mondays, so the interruptions and modifications can be minor. Some teams explicitly have moved their Sprint so their start and end days don’t fall on a Monday or Friday.
ScrumMaster Is on Holiday: Everyone deserves time off. If the ScrumMaster is on personal time off, have the Product Owner or one of the team members take over for the days they’re off. This is a great way for team members to enhance their capabilities. [Watch for an upcoming blog on cross-training.]
Single member gone for the entire Sprint: If one team member is gone for a couple of days, don’t change any team behaviors. On the other hand, if a team member is gone for the whole Sprint, then it’s best to remove them as a resource and explicitly state their absence at the planning meeting.
WARNING!
Don’t leave working days in the calendar that aren’t covered by some phase of the Sprint. For example, if the Sprint ends on a Thursday and starts on a Monday, then Friday should be marked as a holiday. If Friday isn’t a holiday, you risk the team not working on the correct items.
Non-Holiday Events If there is some extreme event, such as a hurricane or snowstorm, and part of the team won’t be able to make some of the ceremonies, first, have the ceremonies anyway. Remember, keeping the Sprint and team cadence is very important.
To keep everyone up to date, consider recording your ceremonies. Some high-trust teams I work with record their planning and demos as part of their process. There are a couple of advantages of recording ceremonies, including:
Absent members can go back and watch the video
Team members can go back to previous discussions to get clarity on details
It provides strong evidence of transparency
It is hard to argue with “The team operates at such a high level of trust that all major meetings are recorded; is that something your non-Agile group is doing?”
Holiday Scheduling to Optimize Sprints Conclusion
Holidays should be a time for everyone to relax and unwind. Proper planning can remove much of the work-related stress. Teams, as they mature, will evolve their approach to planning. No plan for the holidays is almost guaranteed to cause issues, so work together as a team to plan out holidays and any other planned (or even unplanned) time off.
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