5 Levels Of Planning

5 Levels Of Planning. Project Vision This is the highest level of requirement possible and describes in quite broad terms what business problem the project is trying to solve Release Planning As we discuss the project and each business objective within the project we will determine that more functionality is necessary especially if we look at the solution from the endusers’ perspective Iteration Planning Iteration planning is the domain of the technical team but in collaboration with the business This is where we are able to change direction introduce new capabilities as stories reprioritize our work or even decide if the work done so far is good enough to release early Rolling LookAhead Planning For each level of planning outlined above it is vital that these efforts are not single events but rather ongoing work that is as much a part of the project as coding and testing.

The Five Levels of Planning are Vision Roadmap Release Iteration (or Sprint) Daily.

Five Levels of Agile Planning SolutionsIQ

owner An approach with multiple levels of planning has to avoid the reintroduction of the big design up front Planning activities for largescale development efforts should rely on five levels • Product Vision • Product Roadmap • Release Plan • Sprint Plan • Daily Commitment.

The 5 Levels of Agile Planning to Flow Work Efficiently

VisionRoadmapReleaseIterationDaily Stand UpBefore creating your vision statement we must focus on the customer by identifying the roles that will be interacting with the product This step will help better understand the customer and will help in writing user stories based on these roles Another technique to consider at this stage is to associate personas for each role These personas will help the team humanize the work and ensure that they write test scripts for different types of users that go beyond the obvious user experience The simplest way to capture your vision is to use the Elevator Pitch format from Geoffrey Moore’s template from Crossing the Chasm FOR (target customer) WHO (statement of the need or opportunity) THE (product name) is a (product category) THAT (key benefit compelling reason to buy) UNLIKE (primary competitive alternative) OUR PRODUCT (statement of primary differentiation) With the Vision published and accepted by all the Roadmap will serve as the next building block to ensure alignment to the original Vision This Roadmap is meant to be used as a tool to organize highlevel pieces of the product These can be business features and/or architectural components that must be understood in terms of their value and dependencies These pieces must be organized over a period of time and the most typical way is to maintain a rolling fourquarter view of the work Every time a quarter (or whatever dimension is used) ends the Roadmap must be updated for the next four quarters Instead of writing detailed requirements for the entire Roadmap this next level of planning only focuses on the upcoming release which corresponds to a quarter or whatever dimension used in your Roadmap The goal of the release is to produce a backlog of work that is represented by a list of user stories that are estimated prioritized and ordered 1 Stories– work written as user stories with acceptance criteria and they are ordered by feature themes or various groupings to help visualize the work 2 Estimates– all the stories have a relative sizing typically using story points that include design development and testing 3 Plan– the prioritized work based on value fits with the capacity of the team(s) assigned to this release An iterative approach simply means that the work is timeboxed into a set length of time The ideal iteration length is 2 weeks any longer than this will most likely cause the business side to disrupt the iteration by adding/changing the content of iteration the planning and review ceremonies in Scrum to take longer and procrastination to naturally creep in From a testing standpoint all the work planned in the iteration must be tested in order to embrace the Agile value of focusing on working software This means that the team will need to test first by embracing TDD (Test Driven Development) and ultimately BDD (Behavior Driven Development) These techniques promote full team collaboration during planning and designing during the iteration in order to define the test case and build the test scripts As we will describe in the next two sections it will be very important to write good user stories and include clear acceptance criteria The last level of planning should not be undermined Having a clear plan every morning before starting the day is critical to ensure that the team is on the same page and that everyone on the team has a sense of purpose and meaning about the work to be accomplished each day This planninglevel takes place within a daily session lasting no more than 15 minutes where each member of the team answers the following 3 questions 1 What did I accomplish yesterday? 2 What I am planning to accomplish today? 3 Any impediments in my way? This short planning session is typically followed by breakout sessions based on the facts shared during the Daily Stand Up Since we don’t focus on solving issues during the Daily Stand Up the topics that require deeper conversations or help from other team members should be tackled immediately during these breakout sessions The best time for anyone in the organization to communicate with a team is to catch them at the end of the Daily Stand Up.