Frequently asked questions
Find answers to our most common questions below — and discover how Fractional Agile brings expert, cost-effective technical talent directly to your team.
General questions
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What is the main purpose of your service?
Fractional Agile gives smaller development teams access to Agile facilitation in a flexible, budget-friendly way.
Why fractional?
The economics of hiring a full-time Scrum Master rarely add up for smaller development teams. Contract Scrum Masters typically cost £600+ per day (£6,000 per Sprint) through agencies, while traditional consultancies easily charge £1,000+ per day (£10,000 per Sprint).
With Fractional Agile at £625 per day, a typical commitment of 3 days per Sprint comes to just £1875 per Sprint — delivering Agile expertise while freeing up budget for other critical hires.
Questions about pricing
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How much do your fractional services cost?
Our fractional services are invoiced at £625 per day. However, that time is split across the entire Sprint to cover all Scrum ceremonies and backlog management sessions.
How many fractional days should we commit to?
To cover your core Agile ceremonies and ensure sufficient capacity for backlog management, we recommend starting with 4 days per Sprint. This allocation covers full Sprint facilitation alongside dedicated sessions for backlog refinement, triage, and defect management.
Once your backlog reaches a steady, sprint-ready state, you can seamlessly scale down to 3 days per Sprint. Should you face an intensive delivery phase or an unexpected spike in workload, additional days can be added on an ad-hoc basis.
How often do you invoice?
We invoice on a regular 28 day billing cycle (covering two 2-week Sprints). This keeps invoicing predictable, aligns with your development cadence, and ensures transparent cost tracking.
Do you offer a discount to charities or public sector organisations?
Yes, we do! Contact us today to start a conversation about our discounted rates for charities and public sector organisations.
Will the pricing change over time?
We review our rates annually to reflect underlying operational costs. To help you budget with confidence, we provide early advance notice of any updates, with all price adjustments taking effect only in April.
Questions about Agile facilitation
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What does an Agile Facilitator do?
An Agile Facilitator guides your core ceremonies, manages backlog refinement, and delivers actionable progress reports on your team's velocity. Beyond those core responsibilities, we are also available for custom tasks tailored to your team's specific workflow and management priorities.
What's the difference between and Agile Facilitator and a Scrum Master?
Like a Scrum Master, an Agile Facilitator ensures your development team holds focused, productive ceremonies with clear, valuable outcomes.
The main difference lies in impediment resolution: while a full-time Scrum Master actively drives day-to-day blocker removal, a fractional Agile Facilitator focuses primarily on ceremony execution and backlog coordination, only stepping in to support blocker resolution if asked.
Questions about scrum ceremonies
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What ceremonies do you recommend?
To run an effective Sprint, we recommend the core Scrum ceremonies: Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. We also advise scheduling at least two sessions per Sprint for Backlog Triage and Backlog Refinement.
What is 'walking the board'?
The Daily Scrum isn't just an individual status check — it's a focused discussion on progress toward the team's shared Sprint Goal. By 'walking the board' with the Sprint board visible to everyone, the team gets clear visual context on progress, active blockers, and completed items, making it easy to see how every task affects overall Sprint delivery.
What is Sprint Confidence?
As part of our Daily Scrum, we ask the team to gauge their confidence in the Sprint using a standard RAG status (red, amber, or green). Functioning like traffic lights, this metric aligns low, medium, and high confidence levels to ensure early visibility into whether the Sprint goal will be met.
What are Backlog Triage & Refinement?
Backlog Triage is the process of validating and categorising new tasks, user stories, and bugs. Conducted regularly, it ensures every ticket in your backlog offers clear business value and is ready for team refinement.
Backlog Refinement is the practice of adding detailed requirements, acceptance criteria, and potential risks to high-priority tickets — enabling developers to accurately estimate effort and prioritise items for upcoming Sprints.
Questions about backlog management
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Can we schedule additional Backlog Management sessions?
If your backlog requires additional triage or refinement sessions, we are happy to facilitate them. However, we always aim to balance thorough preparation with team productivity — over indexing on meetings can lead to fatigue, ultimately becoming counterproductive to delivery.
Still got questions?
If you have a question that wasn't answered here, feel free to reach out and ask us directly.