April 10, 2024, Agile Boston presentation by Dan LeFebvre

Setting the Stage for Agility

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses face an ever-evolving landscape marked by rapid technological advancements, shifting consumer preferences, and increasing global competition. This dynamic environment demands flexibility and responsiveness that traditional project management techniques often fail to provide. Agility, therefore, becomes not just an asset but a necessity for organizations aiming to survive and thrive amidst these changes.

Empirical release planning emerges as a critical strategy within this context. It’s an approach that leverages real-world data and ongoing feedback to guide project planning and execution. Unlike conventional methods that rely heavily on assumptions and fixed schedules, empirical planning allows businesses to adapt their strategies based on actual performance and changing conditions. This adaptability ensures that organizations can respond swiftly to opportunities and challenges, making empirical release planning a pivotal tool for navigating the complexities of the modern business environment.

Table of Contents

• Setting the Stage for Agility
• The Essence of Empirical Planning
• Sizing and Estimation
  • Affinity Sizing
• Visualizing Progress with Burndown Charts
• Multi-Team Coordination for Complex Projects
• Incorporating Empirical Planning into Business Strategies
• The Future of Business is Agile
• Ready to Transform Your Project Management Approach?
• Downloadable Slides

The Essence of Empirical Planning

Empirical planning is a strategy that prioritizes real-world evidence and ongoing adaptation over rigid, upfront planning. This approach differs from traditional planning methods that rely on extensive pre-project analysis and fixed timelines. Traditional approaches assume a predictable environment where all variables can be foreseen and controlled. However, the current business landscape is unpredictable, making empiricism critical.

In one of his classes, Ken Schwaber demonstrated the futility of traditional approaches. The exercise involved identifying all the variables required to plan a heat and cooling system for a day without a thermostat or access to a room with up to 200 people. The class developed a list of 6 to 12 variables, many of which were unpredictable.

Empirical planning is flexible and allows organizations to respond to unforeseen challenges and opportunities as they arise. This approach ensures that planning and execution evolve based on actual project insights and results, enhancing businesses’ ability to navigate complexity and uncertainty effectively. In Ken’s exercise, the thermostat provided empiricism as it adjusts the demand for heating or cooling based on the actual temperature.

Sizing and Estimation

Conventional work estimation in hours or days is less effective than relative sizing. This involves comparing items based on their complexity, amount of work, and uncertainty, encouraging a more collaborative and intuitive approach to planning. This method acknowledges the variable nature of work and the difficulty of predicting exact time frames, promoting adaptability as a key strength.

Two effective methods for sizing releases are Affinity Sizing and Large-Scale Sizing.

Affinity Sizing

Affinity sizing helps teams size a large batch of items. The Tech Agilist has a good description of the technique. The only modification I make is near the end when the groups are labeled. I suggest the teams use Planning Poker to number the average size of the column instead of the T-shirt method. That leads to good discussions that move items and produce more accurate estimates. This tool is very time-efficient. I once helped an organization size a 100-item Product Backlog in just one hour using this method.

Large-scale sizing expands on relative sizing by sizing the large chunks relatively and then calculating conversion ratios for each more detailed level. Here’s how it works. First you start creating a story map and write the feature items and size them. We’ll call these points, feature points.

Next, take the middle-sized item and break it down into epics and size them into epic points. It is important to note that the scales of the two types of points, feature and epic points, are not the same. In this example, we have four features sized and one of them refined into three sized epics.

Again, take the middle epic and refine that into stories. In this case, we have four stories, sized, and they add up to 24 total story points.

Now, we have all we need to size the release. We determine the conversion rate for epic points into story points. In this case, it is 8 epic points is 24 story points or for each epic point they are 3 story points each. Next, we calculate the number of epic points in a feature point. In our example, we have an 8 feature point item is equivalent to 32 epic point or 1 feature point is 4 epic points. Each feature point is 12 story points here. The release is 66 feature points. This is the equivalent of 792 story points.

By adopting these sizing strategies, organizations can better align their projects with the dynamic demands of the marketplace, ensuring their planning and execution processes are rooted in empirical data and adaptive learning. This shift towards empirically informed estimation practices is not merely a change in methodology but a fundamental part of achieving agility and resilience in today’s complex business landscape.

Visualizing Progress with Burndown Charts

Burndown charts are a simple tool that serves a dual purpose. Firstly, they enhance transparency by enabling team members and stakeholders to have a shared understanding of the release status at any time. This common visual language fosters alignment and sets the stage for open discussions on release health. Secondly, burndown charts provide real-time insight that facilitates necessary adjustments. Teams can quickly identify when the pace of work is not aligning with expectations, allowing for early interventions to address challenges, redistribute items, or recalibrate goals as needed.

A burndown chart starts with an initial sum of work units, often measured in story points or items, plotted on the vertical axis while the horizontal axis tracks time. The black dashed line represents the trend line and the yellow lines represent the cone of uncertainty. The red dashed line is the deadline or milestone date.

As the release advances, the chart is updated to reflect the remaining work, ideally showing a downward trend that converges to zero by the release’s end. This downward trajectory represents the team’s average velocity or throughput toward release completion, offering a visual cue to the pace of work and highlighting any deviations from the planned schedule. Where the trend line crosses zero is the current projected date with a 50% confidence. The intersection of the cone of uncertainty with the horizontal axis indicate the range of possible dates for the release.

Often, more work is discovered. The scope change is represented by vertical black hashed lines.

So let’s read the state of this release. The trend line crosses the x-axis after the red deadline. That means we have less than a 50% chance of making the date. Actually it is 16% for this example. It could be as much as two sprints late. The PO has two choices, move the commit date to 7/3 or 7/17 or reduce the scope by 8 to 20 story points. That is where the trend line and the slow cone edge crosses the deadline.

Incorporating burndown charts into an organization’s project management practices underscores a commitment to empirical planning and continuous improvement. Burndown charts enable teams to visualize progress and adapt strategies based on actual performance. This is crucial in achieving the flexibility and responsiveness that define business agility in today’s dynamic environment.

Multi-Team Coordination for Complex Projects

As organizations strive for business agility, the challenge of synchronizing efforts across diverse teams becomes paramount. This coordination is about maintaining pace and ensuring all teams align toward the project’s common goals. To this end, the Product Owners of each team form a PO team. That team holds collaboration events to create shared Product and Sprint goals, align items to minimize dependencies, and move work around to maximize the value of the release. This collaboration event can be called a Meta Scrum, Scaled Refinement, or Scaled Planning.

Using multiple burndown charts can be particularly effective in managing multi-team projects. Each team can maintain its burndown chart, tracking progress against its specific set of items or stories. The project’s health will be the team that finishes the latest. Product Owners can quickly identify areas of concern, monitor the impact of interdependencies, and make informed decisions to guide the project toward successful completion. In this example, team 1 is ahead and team 3 is behind. The PO team can see if moving work from 3 to 1 is feasible or do they have to move the date or reduce scope. The release burndown charts help frame this conversation

Organizations can embody the core principles of agility and adaptability by integrating these strategies into managing multi-team projects. With detailed tracking and effective communication, they can navigate project complexities more efficiently, ensuring their ambitious endeavors are realized with accuracy and agility.

Incorporating Empirical Planning into Business Strategies

Incorporating empirical planning into business strategies marks a pivotal shift towards agility and adaptability, crucial for thriving in today’s fast-paced market. Here’s actionable advice for businesses eager to embrace this approach within their project management practices:

1. Embrace Iterative Planning: Move away from the traditional set-and-forget planning models. Adopt an iterative approach where plans are regularly revisited and revised based on real-world feedback and outcomes. This allows your business to remain flexible and responsive to changes, ensuring strategies always align with current conditions.
2. Foster Open Communication: Create open, transparent communication channels within and across teams. Encourage sharing of insights, challenges, and feedback on ongoing projects. A culture that values clear and honest communication is essential for effective empirical planning, as it relies on accurate, timely information to make adjustments.
3. Implement Reflective Practices: Integrate regular reflection sessions into your project cycles. Use these meetings to analyze what’s working, what isn’t, and how processes can be improved. This practice supports continuous learning and empowers teams to take ownership of their work and improve their practices.
4. Cultivate a Safe-to-Fail Environment: Empirical planning involves experimentation and learning from outcomes, which means only some initiatives will be successful. Establish an organizational culture that views failures as learning opportunities rather than setbacks. This encourages innovation and experimentation, crucial components of agility.
5. Invest in Agile Training and Tools: Provide your teams with the training, resources, and tools they need to implement empirical planning effectively. Whether through workshops or coaching, equipping your team with the proper knowledge is fundamental.

By adopting these strategies, businesses can foster a culture that supports continuous learning, improvement, and agility, positioning themselves to navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape more effectively.

The Future of Business is Agile

As we’ve navigated through the intricacies of empirical release planning, it’s clear that this approach is not just a methodology but a fundamental shift toward sustained business agility. With its core reliance on real-world data and adaptability, empirical planning offers businesses the tools to navigate the unpredictable waters of today’s market. The advantages are manifold: enhanced flexibility, improved responsiveness to change, and a continuous improvement and learning culture. These benefits collectively ensure that organizations can meet and exceed the evolving demands of their customers and the market at large.

The future of business leans heavily towards agility. In an era marked by rapid technological advancements and shifting consumer expectations, more than rigid, traditional planning methods are needed. Instead, embracing agile practices, characterized by empirical planning and iterative development, is crucial for long-term success. As businesses look forward, adopting these practices is not merely an option but a necessity. By doing so, organizations can ensure they remain competitive, innovative, and capable of thriving in the dynamic marketplace of tomorrow.

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Downloadable Slides

The slides that were presented at Agile Boston.