Project Managers, What Should You Take On The Way To Your Agile Journey? - Part 3 - Planning

Post date: Apr 19, 2015 12:07:20 PM

Sometimes you need to plan some strategic project, even in an agile context. Not enough information is available but a rough estimation is still needed.

In these situations you can use your skills on planning tasks and decomposing them in order to estimate strategically important projects in advance . Usually these projects have more constraints with regards to functionality, delivery date and/or outsourcing contracts.

Therefore it is recommended to decompose user stories into tasks, estimate hours needed to perform them, see how many hours fit into an iteration and then see how many story points correspond to it.

Gantt charts for assigning user stories to iterations and performing iteration assignment at team level are also useful. Such charts depict duration of user stories as being the whole iteration to reflect that they are 100% completed at the end of an iteration. It is useful especially in the transition period to agile.

When planning big projects with multiple teams it is useful to consider a schedule buffer equivalent to two standard deviations which is computed as the square root of the sum of squares of the difference between the 90% accurate probability estimations and the 50% accurate probability estimations.

This formula gives the best accuracy when there are at least ten user stories, if not, then consider half of the sum of all story points as the buffer (in general it should be 20% of the overall project) and a feature buffer of one third (30% of the features optional).

According to Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), budget buffers make sense especially for large projects, specifying user stories three iterations in advance and planning with multiple teams to address an estimation baseline that is consistent throughout teams, at the same time considering dependencies between teams in advance and guard them with schedule buffers not exceeding half of the iteration.

These useful planning techniques that you already master will certainly help you in the agile journey.