Agile Planning
This was the title of last week’s meeting of the Bay Area Agile Leadership, featuring James Shore. And it was really about iteration planning.
The presenter used an exercise (shortened because of time constraints) where the attendance is divided into multiple groups: teams in charge of building an iteration plan (that include product managers/ subject matter experts) and individual that represent stakeholders that are not part of the team. the purpose is for each team to gather requirements, set the priorities and estimations and come up with an iteration plan. Everyone then votes on the best plan. In this instance there were two competing teams.
Surprisingly to me, the team that I felt pay better attention to my requirements was the one that proposed the least appealing plan. In our case the teams were planning a 20 minutes talk on Agile. The key was to discover that stakeholders preferred an in depth talk rather than a breadth one (or as Keith Berry put it, preferred an iPod to a Zune). Interestingly the actual contents of the planned presentation were fairly similar but offered in a very different way. The in-depth offer gathered more buy-in. Did it leave up to expectations ? Somewhat. At least enough that I would attend the second iteration.
The main take away for me from this meeting is that there are (at least) three obvious ways of failing in Agile planning. The first one is to fail to gather requirements properly. In an Agile setup this can be corrected easily as long as the supposed requirements are approximately correct. The second one is that the iteration plan you propose may not be appealing to the stakeholders and lead to loss of interest on their part. This is probably the most difficult one to correct (especially in early iterations), as you get only one chance to make a first impression. The third one is to fail to align the delivery and the expectations set by the plan, which is to me personally what happened that day. I believe a project can survive the last one if ut delivered something good (although below expectations) and it does not happen every iteration.