Is Project a Marathon or a Sprint

 

 I have unabashedly copied the famous quote by Phillip C. McGraw and changed it to fit our projects. While Mr. McGraw described the same about life, I think our projects are no different.

  We as project managers, run agile sprints to deliver what our customer expects. The sprint in turn expects a cadence to be followed. A cadence that needs to be rhythmic for a long term. So, does this cadence not translate itself into a Marathon in the form of a Project?

 

Let us review the classic definitions of both Sprint and Marathon and decide:

 Sprint is defined:

•   for a clearly defined scope

•   with a very solid to unmistakable understanding of deliverables

•   for a fixed and usually (comparatively) short time window

•   with clearly defined and assigned resources

 Marathon is when one wants to emphasize:

•   a team needs to set and maintain a long-term focus

•   individual commitments for the long run (years instead of just weeks/months)

•   the complexity of an undertaking is higher

 

So, a marathon can be thought of as a group of sprints that have a common subject from a certain area of your backlog. Marathons could also be considered collections of Sprints tied to a larger or longer goal.

 As project managers, we need to convert our weekly/monthly Sprints into a steady marathon run. Steadily(but not slowly) we will reach our desired running cadence which is needed for our projects to succeed. Just like we have done in the past, we will take this project too to its closure state.

 

 Let us keep the project management spirit of “We Deliver” intact and start this marathon. We all are in it together to WIN!!!