Release Planning: Completing the Plan

As discussed in the previous post on Release Planning, the user stories are now ordered.

(Please see this post for a list of all the posts on Release Planning.)

Now we must complete the Release Plan.

So, we must make the trade-off between scope and date.

There are three ways to do this:

1. Fixed Release Date.  We will release every X months or Y sprints.

Some teams or firms prefer to have a fixed release date. It makes things simple.  It makes managers and others realize that we will release.  They only question is exactly what will be in the release.

2. Fixed scope.  We will release when all of the scope (all the stories or PBIs in that scope) is/are done.

3. Trade-off.  We understand our velocity and go down the Product Backlog a ways. And ask: two sprints, umm, how many features are done?  Ok, three sprints, how many features are done.  Ok, four sprints, umm, customers would really like to see another release, the market needs it, but do we have enough?  Ok, five sprints, umm, I think we have enough.  Let's shoot for that.  -- It is that kind of trade-off.

This requires that we know our velocity.

Estimating Velocity

With an existing team, you might already know their velocity. With a new team, you must guess.

So, we do a calculation to get an educated guess.

First, for the 1 story point reference story (for effort)... how many ideal person days would it take. The Team huddles around the story and reaches a decision.  Imagine the number is 1 SP = 1.5 ideal days.

Imagine the Team has 6 doers (of real work).

Imagine the Team will do 2 week Sprints.

Let's assume the focus factor is 60%. That means, out of an 8 hour day, roughly 60% of the minutes are usable for the project.  The other minutes are used talking about the game, taking breaks, eating lunch, getting interrupted, answering questions, reading the email, going to company meetings, etc, etc.  Maybe some work, but not work on this project.

Calculation:

2 weeks = 10 days.

6 x 10 = 60

60 x 60% = 36

36 x (1-40%) = 21.6

21.6 / 1.5 = 14.4 Story Points for the 1st Sprint.

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We subtract the 40% has a start-up "cost" for the 1st Sprint.  The Team is learning Scrum, the Team is "forming, storming, norming, performing..", the Team always wants to over-estimate what they can do in a timebox. 
For the 2nd Sprint, we subtract 20%.  For the 3rd Sprint, we subtract maybe nothing.

You may find that these rule of thumb numbers need to be adjusted for special situations.  But they seem to work for most start-up teams.

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36 x (1 - 20%) = 28.8

28.8 / 1.5 = 19.2 story points for 2nd sprint

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36 * (1) = 36

36 / 1.5 = 24 story points for 3rd sprint

And so on...

Communications Plan

I tend to put pressure on new Product Owners to release earlier.  They are mentally too tied to the concept of the 100% - 100% rule.  That nothing can be released until everything is done.  This is almost always just wrong.  Hence, I always ask for an earlier release.

Once the PO and Team agree on the scope and date, we then have to talk about the "communications plan", as I call it.

If the Team works with a manager who truly understands adaptive planning (meaning that the current plan will be revised and improved every sprint... this is only the first guess at the plan)... then tell that manager the truth.  Here's what we guess, this is what we are worried about.  This is our feeling about how it is likely to change.  And maybe we have contradictory feelings.

But often some key managers do NOT understand adaptive planning. These "tough" managers (or customers) want you to give a fixed date, and then deliver to that date.

Then you are stuck. So, we have to do what we used to do in waterfall. Add some "buffers" (aka padding, etc, etc) to the date.  For "problems", for new stories to be identified later, etc, etc.

It is hard to guess how much buffer to add.  We have no additional magic.

But, we do strongly suggest that you protect yourself and your Team. Do not get them in a situation of a Death March, trying to meet an impossible date.  More about this later....

And then we talk about, "ok, how will we communicate the date?"  (Almost always, the key issue is the date.) You have to start setting expectations that the date will change if other things change (substantially), and they are likely to change substantially.  This is not one conversation by the PO, but a series of conversations by and with many people.  It is over time that the start to see and feel the power of adaptive planning.

For some of you, the issue is not so much "communications plan", but "what do we put in the contract".  Too big a subject for this post.

Finalizing the Plan

Assuming you have "business stakeholders" as I described them earlier, then always you have to review the release plan you have with them.  Get their buy-in or comments or adjustments.  This of course may affect the communications plan.

So, this is most of the basics.  A bunch of issues we have not addressed.  Some I will address in the next post.

Self-organization

We have this idea in Agile, that the Team should self-organize.  This is an important idea. And also an important occurrence (eg, the reality precedes the idea).

In Agile, self-organization is compared to command-and-control.

We think self-org is an important thing to study, both in general and in your Team.

Why

Well, one, because it is just right.  People are free, and self-organization is saying that the Team is allowed to be free.

I guess this needs to be explained a bit.  Some will say: well, the company has bought their time as employees, so the company gets to define what the Team does.  Well, let is concede this at a high level; let us say that the company may define the vision or the goal or the general product.  Perhaps even the user stories.  The Team members are not slaves, but we can assume that, as employees, they agree to do the company's work for pay.  A contract.

But, devising the work, figuring out how they will get to the goal, they should have the freedom to do.

The second main answer is: self-organizing humans tend to do better work than human 'slaves' (humans directed by one or a few command-and-control people).

There is lots of evidence of this. The first book I recommend is The Wisdom of Teams by Katzenbach and Smith.  This is a rather old book.  But the basic evidence is that a self-organizing team out-performs, almost always, an individual.  And to such a degree that the extra cost is well worth it.  But, you must given them some degree of 'freedom'.

There are also a lot of more recent evidence.

Some topic you may wish to research:
Self-organization
Complex Adaptive Systems
Maneuver Warfare
Free Enterprise
Knowledge Creation

Note: Some people say that a free enterprise system is mainly characterized by (mostly) private ownership of capital (means of production). And attribute its successes or failures to that. Others focus on the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions (much like the "wisdom of crowds" idea) and on the view of the national economy as a complex adaptive system, trying to accomplish high-level economic success via many individual agents (people or companies) making their own decisions.  In our view, successful free enterprise countries exhibit many of the successful characteristics related to self-organization.

Command-and-Control Managers

Lots of managers have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that the 'workers' are dumb, and the manager must tell the worker how to work.  In our view, especially for virtually 100% of knowledge workers (our domain), this is very very incorrect teaching.  But it is nonetheless, what they have been taught.

Now, some of them also understand freedom to some degree, and understand that they want the people in their group to 'think for themselves'. But, we can say with relative assurance, most companies have a lot of people who are relatively command-and-control in their style.

And, in pressure situations (our common situation), they want to use too much command-and-control.

Again, this is not true of all managers, but of many. It depends, in part, on the company's culture.

It is hard to convince these people to be patient for self-organization.

Teams that won't self-organize

This is seen in real teams.

There seem to be several root causes. One, the team has been beat down by command-and-control managers so much, that they have 'forgotten' how to self-organize.  Another: that they Team does not believe it when managers say 'self-organize'.  Another: The Team is fearful that by self-organizing they will be 'held accountable' with punishment a likely outcome.  To avoid pain, they refuse to self-organize.

Whatever the reason, two things can be said.

Many Team (perhaps with Agile coaches) do eventually break out from being 'stuck' (not self-organizing).

And some Teams may take a very long time or perhaps never do it.

The key advice is this: If the Team will not self-organize, or seems to want to self-organize to mediocrity, then a good manager should intervene.  Temporarily.

Perhaps prior key advice: Be patient. Often Teams will self-organize in two or three sprints.  Keep talking about it, and ask them if they need help.

Third advice: In the view of some (including me), some Teams lack some key skills to self-organize. For example, a new junior Team may not know really how to break down work into tasks for the sprint planning meeting. Sometimes 'holding their hand' as they mature is a very successful approach.  And 3 or 4 sprint later, they can be very good at self-organizing their own Sprint Backlog.

Learning to decide as a Team

I think each Team learns how to decide.

The first, most useful thing, is that everyone in the Team gets to offer input on a decision.

Next, the Team needs to accept that no decision is ever perfect.  Thus, decisions in general must be made, perhaps not always quickly, but promptly.

The Team needs to understand the impact of decisions on the morale of the Team and on the success of the Team.

In our view, most teams go through a forming and storming period of decision-making.  And then later get better.

Good self-organization... and better

Lots of Teams seems to self-organize well.

What is also common is for most Teams to plateau.

In part, we may say that a root cause is that most Teams want to reach a stasis... a place where things are balanced and where change slows down.

But have they reached the height of improvement?  We think not.  Some Teams have reached much higher heights.  And some Teams keep on improving.

There seem to be two main factors (or sets of factors):
* magic -- or, more accurately, a bunch of things that are hard to describe.
* a bunch of factors that people talk about, and some teams study and work on

Some of these last factors seem to be quite 'soft'.  Love, listening, creativity, heart seem to be among them.

Lastly

If you have never been on a good team, it is hard to understand what self-organizing is all about.

Within the Team, it might be rather rough and ready. But a lot depends on the specific individuals in the Team.

Release Planning: Risks, Dependencies, Learning, MMFS and Other

Now we come to the point of (re)ordering the Product Backlog.

(This is a continuation of a series on Release Planning that starts here.)

You will recall that the Product Owner's main goal is to maximize the Business Value from the Team.  In some time period (shorter or longer, as makes best business sense in your specific situation).  So, in theory the R factor (see the previous post) should be the way to organize the Product Backlog, ceretis paribus (other things equal).

But of course other things are never exactly equal.

So, here is where the most uncommon thing comes into play.  Common sense.

And we re-order the work based on these factors: Risks, dependencies, learning, MMFS, and other factors.

We recommend that anyone in the Team can propose to move a user story earlier or later based on these factors. But he or she must discuss the change with the Team and get reasonable consensus.  If there is no consensus, then the Product Owner gets the final decision.

So, let's discuss each factor in turn.

Risks. There are potentially many types of risk. Business risk is often a big one. For example, we need to get a feature out before a competitor.  Or we have a weak understanding of the specific detailed features needed in area X.  Technology risk is another common factor. We are about to use new technology, and we are not sure how it will work.  And there are other types of risk.  In Scrum, we tend to want to attack risk early, by doing one or more stories in that area, to see if the risk is just a worry, or a real roadblock.

Dependencies.  Again, these can be of several types.  In the past, we often organized the work mainly by technical dependencies.  Since the job now is to maximize business value, we sometimes must sacrifice efficiency of the Team.  But if technical dependencies will destroy the efficiency of the Team, then we must deal with that. (Ok, seriously diminish the efficiency...).  And there can be business dependencies as well.  It makes more sense to develop step 1 in a process before step 2.  At least sometimes.

Learning. In Agile we recognize the importance of learning. We need to learn what the customers really want. We need to learn some technical things to become more effective.  These can be good reasons to chnage the order of the work.

MMFS.  Minimum market feature set.  This phrase is from Software By Numbers by Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang.  The idea is that there is some minimal set of features that must be put together before a customer can realize the value of the whole set.  Sometimes this minimum is quite small, quite small indeed.  In other circumstances it is much larger.  In general, too many of us (producers and customers) have been brainwashed into believing the 100%-100% rule, so that we think the MMFS is much larger than it really is.  In any case, low value features sometimes must be moved up, in order to add the 'missing something' to make the next release truly 'usable'.

Other. This is a catch-all for all the other reasons we have to change the order of the user stories.  My favorite example is this: A committee is going to me in 3 weeks to decide on the funding for our project.  George is on the committee.  In our opinion as PO and in the opinion of everyone else, George is much too excited about user story 87, which currently would not be built until the third release, and that is assuming no new user stories get identified, which is very very unlikely.  But, George is on the committee. And user story 87 is only 5 story points (our velocity is 25).  So, we ask the Team to go ahead and get the story done in the next Sprint so that George helps assure that the project gets further funding.  Not rational, not 'the right thing to do', but sometimes you have to deal with real people and irrational things have to happen.

In our experience, Risks and Learning should be used more often to re-order the product backlog.  And Dependencies less often.  But in any case, using the R factor solely is almost never the right answer.

How to do this

We recommend that the product backlog already be ordered by the R factor. (The R factor was discussed in the previous post on Release Planning.)

We recommend that the whole Team be there (PO, SM and implementers) and the business stakeholders.

Then, anyone in the group can start to suggest re-ordering the product backlog based on any of the ideas above.  Any move has to be explained to the whole group.  If there are disagreements, the PO makes the final decision. 

Again, let me emphasize that sharing knowledge with the whole team is at least as important as any other outcome we are trying to achieve.  So, doing this without the Team is not recommended.

Normally this does not take very long. Again, 6 months of work for one team is typically expressed as about 50 user stories.  So, re-ordering 50 user stories, where most do not move, does not take long.

More to come....