A Best Practices Guide to Agile Planning for Project Managers

In Agile project management, the product itself is developed in sprints. The goal of sprint planning is to determine the features and functionality that will be included in the next iteration. Before each sprint begins, a sprint planning meeting takes place between the product owner and development team members. The user stories and backlog are reviewed to determine the tasks that can be completed during the sprint. These plans deliver a finer level of detail (compared to the high-level release plan), including which tasks are to be performed by which team members and how long each task will take.

Activities that occur during the Agile planning process include:

Task Planning: Agile team members break the features down into tasks and then team members take those tasks on. As a matter of best practice, look at the time estimates and try to break any task that may take longer than a day down into smaller tasks. This helps to reduce uncertainty and foster successful task completion. It also feeds into the job of estimating, as it is much easier to estimate the time required to complete a smaller task.

Agile Estimating: It’s true, estimating the time to completion can seem like a matter of voodoo more than science, but some principles can help to make it seem less like guesswork. As a best practice, rely on past success to estimate a particular effort. For example, rely on past feature delivery velocities to plan future velocities. If the team was able to deliver X features in the previous iteration, then plan to deliver X features in the current cycle. In Agile Release Planning By Example, Brian Stallings and Valerie Morris provide the following useful practices for estimating time to completion:

• Reference historical data – Team specific
• Be realistic, not optimistic
• Estimate based on smaller units of work rather than larger ones. Estimates based on tasks rather than features, therefore, are going to be more accurate

User Stories Development: The Declaration of Project Principles states, “We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.” By communicating with the customer, you can determine the overall goal for the project and, in turn, an overall goal for the sprint/iteration. Rely on that goal to develop your feature/user story priorities and then allow your priorities to guide the selection of which features/user stories to develop during the iteration.

Backlog Management: There are two types of backlogs to consider:

• The Product Backlog is the master list of things to be built into the product.
• The Iteration Backlog is the list of priority items to be built during the current iteration.

The key to managing backlogs is managing priorities. Work with your customers to ensure that the most important features are delivered. Again, as the Declaration states, “We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.” The customer can tell you which backlog items have the highest priority, and which backlog items have the highest priority at that time. Priorities can shift, so be sure to check with customers periodically to make certain that the next iteration is still being planned appropriately.

Agile Scheduling: Agile scheduling is perhaps the most “project managerial” of project management activities. The following are some useful guidelines for managing scheduling:

• Schedule in detail only for the immediate iteration: Sprints/iterations are useful for managing uncertainty, but it is adaptability that drives sprints/iterations. Scheduling too far in advance prevents you from being nimble and responding to changing priorities.
• Involve the entire team: Scheduling is a team activity that is driven by estimates, so the team should be involved in the entire process, not merely for accurate scheduling, but also to promote buy-in.
• Design and testing are also part of development: Keep the time for these required activities during sprints/iterations in mind as you build estimates and schedules.
• Include time for the demo meeting: The demo is an important part of the release, and should be part of the schedule.

According to the Declaration of Project Principles, “We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation.” One primary constituent of uncertainty are dependencies. To avoid this pitfall, Agile seeks to limit dependencies through sprint/iteration planning because tasks are not developed with an overarching project in mind, but in a more granular form in which a set of features can be developed in parallel and delivered in working order during the one to four week period that typically defines a sprint/iteration. As a matter of best practice, plan your sprints/iterations to avoid dependencies.