Next Quarter Planning

Problem

Leadership wants to know the delivery timeline of the team for the next quarter:

  • what will be delivered
  • when it will be delivered

Context

  • Different stakeholders push for different initiatives
  • The problem behind each initiative is clear, but the solution is not
  • Cross-functional team

Solution

  • Assign a time appetite for each initiative until the whole quarter is covered
  • At the end of an initiative time appetite, decide to either:
    • move to the next initiative, as planned
    • keep working on the current initiative and subtract the extra time appetite from an upcoming initiative

Time appetite

  • Time appetite means the amount of weeks the team desire to work on an initiative
  • Time appetite only covers delivery, not planning (see later)
  • The key idea is to deliver the best within a fixed time frame and then reassess global priorities

Small go-lives

  • The key for the time appetite approach is small go-lives
  • Small go-lives makes it easy to decide to move to the next initiative or rather stay on the current one
  • Even if an initiative has a small time appetite, something is always delivered to the stakeholders of interest
  • Continuous Deployment helps a lot, but it is not a necessary condition
  • Small go-lives bring many nice side effects per se:
    • Faster customer feedback
    • Faster operational feedback (i.e. performance, bugs, observability, etc.)
    • Reduced work in progress and cognitive load

Planning while delivering

  • The planning of an initiative is done before its delivery
  • For planning we mean:
    • problem definition
    • solution definition
    • risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies spiking and resolution
    • scope slicing (i.e. scope defined for each small go-live)
  • The planning is performed by
    • Product manager
    • UX designer
    • Engineer champion (i.e. the engineer who coordinates the others on the initiative)
  • The planning happens while delivering on another initiative:
    • be mindful of the extra work for the people involved in planning
    • the engineer championing the current initiative should not contribute to planning the next one

Time appetite vs estimates

  • Time appetite reverses the classic approach with estimates where:
    • by guessing effort, the team define the scope to be delivered in the quarter for each initiative
    • Team is constantly late to deliver, or worse quality is cut to respect the timeline
    • Stakeholders are frustrated as their initiatives are late or nothing is delivered at all

Notes