Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 13th March 2026.

This week, I:

  • continued to write KPIs;
  • added some extra meetings to the calendar: several short daily standups and a longer weekly team meeting;
  • gave a show-and-tell about our second three-week cycle on OpenPrescribing v2;
  • read a paper about how to design effective and intuitive data visualisations.

Fixed time, variable scope

As I mentioned last week, we’ve been applying techniques from Shape Up. Last week, I talked about pitches. This week, I’m going to talk about fixed time, variable scope.

Fixed time, variable scope means a team holds the time they spend on delivery constant and varies the scope of what they deliver. Contrast this with fixed scope, variable time. I have much (much) more experience of the latter than of the former. In every case, variable time meant taking more, not less, time. And taking more time meant missing deadlines, again and again.

Shape Up calls the time a team spends on delivery a cycle. It suggests adopting either six-week or two-week cycles, with a cool-down period between each cycle. We adopted three-week cycles on OpenPrescribing v2 and, for historical reasons, call the cool-down period deck-scrubbing.

It’s been hard to finish what we’ve been working on by the end of each cycle. Although we finished our first cycle more or less on time, we did some delivery work during deck-scrubbing and we paused some delivery work that we started but didn’t finish. This “overhang” and “unfinished business” were demotivating. We had much less of both with our second cycle, but we discarded work that wasn’t getting good feedback. This was also demotivating, but for different reasons. Nevertheless, at the end of each cycle we were able to give a show-and-tell about a coherent set of features and fixes. We were also able to describe what we discarded and explain why we discarded it, without feeling guilty for spending too much time on it.

Time’s up!