Agile Q&A – how to handle additional work into the sprint

Question from one of our teams:

• Team plans for 50pts in the Sprint.
• A new priority comes to the team, team agrees to take it on, say it’s another 5 pts believing they can do that plus everything else that was planned.
• The team completes the original 50pts, plus the extra 5.
• At the end of the Sprint, what’s the % delivered? 55 Completed / 50 Planned = 110%?

Answer:

When the team is evaluating additional working flying into the team, it’s a collective decision to take it on, and because we want predictability and potentially shippable Sprints, we don’t want to take on more work if it’ll compromise not completing others.

Thus, if the team does decide to take on another 5 points, they’re increasing the commitment to 55 (in this case). Therefore at the end, if they complete all 55, their % delivered is 100%.