Sprint tactics versus strategy

At work right now we have moved from a one week sprint to a two week sprint. This didn’t seem like a big deal at the beginning. The idea was that we spent a lot of the time as a percentage of the work week doing sprint planning and retrospectives. We thought that a two week sprint would let us get an ideal ratio of work to planning.

The reality is a bit different. What we saw was that we had to do a mid-week correction after things didn’t go as planned in the first week. This arose on Tuesday standup of the second week as we looked at the burndown chart.

I’ve been a few places now where we wanted to change the sprint length, and I think I’m starting to see a pattern. The stakeholders see sprint planning as a strategic tool, and the implementers see it more as a tactical tool. Strategically it is advantageous to see out two weeks in advance, but tactically it’s more useful to look at the next few days. I think a lot of conflict and misunderstanding around agile stems from this split.

So is a sprint a strategic tool or a tactical one? I’m still not sure.