In today’s fast-paced world, we are constantly under pressure to deliver results quickly. However, if we do not have a clear vision or strategy, our efforts may be wasted. Agile planning helps us achieve success by creating a shared understanding of what needs to happen. It also allows us to focus on achieving the most important outcomes first. Agile planning is about getting things done – not just talking about them. We can only truly succeed when we take action.
We plan because before starting any work, we like to understand what that work entails. For example, what activities we must perform to achieve the desired outcome, how do we accomplish these activities, how would we deal with issues and risks, who would be responsible for which actions, how much time we will require to complete all those activities, and so forth. In addition, a plan aims to facilitate communication and decision-making by providing a guideline, increasing trust among the team by establishing a shared understanding of work, promoting smoother information flow, and reducing risk by reducing uncertainty about project activities.
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Traditional Approach To Planning
With the traditional approach, the planning is top-down and is concentrated at the beginning. The focus is on getting things right from the start itself. The tendency is to protect the plan from any deviation. In this sense, the planning becomes the commitment from the team to business and customers. If the team needs to consider any variation, they need to go through an elaborate change management process that responds to the evolving business realities and challenges.
Traditional planning is done based on activities. Activities are interrelated as they might have dependencies. While focusing on activities, the business value is often ignored or is secondary. Due to this, the customer usually does not start realizing business benefits till late in the project. Also, the inter-dependencies between activities mean that a delay in one action can delay the entire project. Traditional plans are not very adaptive. They are rigid. Any change in business priorities is treated as a deviation from the program and thus discouraged. This approach is precisely opposite the agile principles. For agile, planning is a supporting process to adapting to changes. Such a system does not mean agile does not value planning. The approach taken on agile projects is different from the one taken by the traditional planning approach.
Agile Planning Approach
Agile planning follows a just-in-time approach. This approach spreads the planning activities across multiple time points in the project, from the business strategy at the highest level to the daily planning. Agile onion is a concept that depicts this kind of multi-level planning. The second aspect that sets apart agile planning is team involvement. Agile planning is not top-down in that the management does not simply define the plan to be followed by the team. Instead, agile planning empowers teams to plan their work. The iterative nature of agile planning enables teams to design and estimate the work to be done soon accurately. This iterative and incremental approach also allows the team to be flexible concerning changes or risks and provides the room to maneuver the project according to the situation.
Characteristics of Agile Planning
Value-Based
At the core of Agile practices is customer value. Agile planning aims to increase this value rather than optimize the schedule or costs like traditional planning approaches. The prioritization approach that Agile adopts reflects this focus on customer value. While there will be many variables effective priorities, the most critical element is determining which user stories would provide the best value to the customer.
Progressively Elaborated
By dividing the planning into multiple levels, Agile Project Management processes ensure that the team develops the most concrete plan for the nearest work for which all (or as many as possible) details are available. While the teams may plan the work far away in the future, these plans will not be concrete and have all the details required. They would be planned at a high level when following agile practices.
Focused on frequent learning
Accepting changes is one of the Agile Methodologies’ hallmarks and optimal customer value. Therefore, agile plans focus on frequent but quick deliveries of functionality so that the teams can learn from business, customer, and market feedback. They then consider this feedback and define the plan for the next increment.
The learning can also be inward-focused. For example, while daily meetings provide a way to adjust plans and processes during the iterations, a retrospective meeting allows one to adopt a better planning approach and methods.
Closely Aligned With Team Capabilities
Agile planning is not absolute in terms of scope and schedule. While timeboxing provides a concrete timeframe for everyone to know when the team will deliver the value, the scope of each such increment closely aligns with each team and how much they can develop in one iteration. The agile teams decide this scope for each iteration based on the historical velocity, which indicates how much the team can deliver each iteration.
Closely Aligned With Changing Business Priorities
The iteration planning is done based on the work to be delivered as defined in the Product Backlog. The Product Owner keeps the product backlog and user stories prioritized. The prioritization can be done based on the customer & business value and other factors influencing business priorities. Since the backlog and priorities can change every iteration, the project teams will plan the work aligned to the business priorities.
Done By Team Members
The agile planning process is not top-down. Instead, it is organic because the entire team and the team only determine how much it can deliver in each iteration. The release plan guides the overall iteration planning but doesn’t constrain it. The outcome of the iteration may influence the release planning, however.
Agile Planning Is Not Sprint Planning
Sprint is the term used by Scrum to describe an iteration. Sprint planning is one part of Agile planning, but the words are not interchangeable. Agile planning is concerned with overall business strategy and the final product to be built as part of that strategy, represented by a product roadmap. The Product Backlog constrains iteration or Sprint Planning. It focuses on the product increment to be delivered at the end of each iteration, typically 1 to 4 weeks long, with a preference for a shorter duration.
Finally
“Agile” planning is more about being flexible than anything else. It enables you to adapt your plan to changing internal and external requirements while still delivering valuable results for businesses and clients. In the coming articles, we will detail various Agile planning aspects in detail. So stay tuned for those, and let us know if you have any feedback or questions.
Part II: User Stories: How To Build A Solid Foundation For Agile Planning?
