Recommendation: Stop letting the vendor run sprint planning.

That’s your roadmap, not theirs.

Sam Halcrow

Fractional CTO · 253 organisations · Sydney

It always starts as a favour. The vendor offers to “take sprint planning off your plate.” You’re busy, they know the codebase, and honestly the ceremonies were dragging. So you say yes.

Eighteen months later, here’s what I find when I’m called in: the backlog is ordered by what’s interesting to build, not what moves the business. Estimates have quietly become elastic. Every sprint is “full” — and somehow the thing you asked about in March still isn’t in one. You’ve stopped pushing, because pushing means a variation, and variations mean money.

Nobody acted in bad faith. That’s what makes this pattern so common — I’ve seen it inside dozens of the 253 organisations I’ve worked with. It’s structural: whoever runs sprint planning decides what your money builds next. When that’s your vendor, your roadmap is being set by the party who profits from how long it takes.

What it actually costs

Not drama — drift. The expensive features stay expensive because nobody on your side of the table is asking “why is this three sprints?” The quick wins your ops team begs for never rank, because they’re boring to build. And the compounding cost is invisible in any single invoice: it’s the quarter-after-quarter gap between what you’re paying for and what the business needed.

THE TELL

If you can’t say, right now, what’s in the current sprint and why it beat everything else — sprint planning has already left the building.

What to do about it — this month

You don’t need to fire anyone, and you don’t need to learn Jira. You need three things back: the ordering (someone on your side ranks the backlog against business outcomes, before planning), the challenge (someone technical enough to ask why an estimate is what it is, in the room), and the record (a one-page note after each planning: what got in, what got bumped, and why — written for you, not for the vendor).

If you have a senior person who can do those three, hand it to them this week. If you don’t — that gap has a name, and it’s the seat I fill.

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