Agile Planning in Action
Immerse yourself in agile planning! This highly-interactive session creates a real-world planning environment, complete with user stories, estimates, stakeholders, and tough planning trade-offs. As part of a team, you’ll compete to create the best product possible. The product? A tutorial on agile development… that our presenter will actually deliver. Just as in real agile planning, you’ll have to figure out what your fellow attendees want to hear about, how to make difficult trade-offs, and how to fit all of the possibilities into the limited time available.
This is a highly interactive session, with very little lecture. It’s aimed at beginners, but anybody can attend and enjoy the session. The session consists of two teams competing to create an agile tutorial using agile planning techniques.
- Introduction—a brief explanation of agile planning (10 min)
- Agile Planning—the main exercise, explained below (30 min)
- Judging—picking a winner (10 min)
- Delivery—delivering the winning tutorial (10 min)
- Debrief—whole-group discussion about what happened and what was learned (30 min)
Participants are divided into two teams of about ten people each. These are the “product teams,” who will be using agile planning techniques to create a tutorial. The rest of the group are “stakeholders.” Part of the job of the product teams is to figure out what the stakeholders want. Each team interviews stakeholders, creates stories, and prioritizes them. I act as the programming team, estimating the stories and setting the iteration budget.
At the end of the planning stage, the stakeholders vote to decide which product team has the winning selection, which I then deliver.
Finally, I facilitate a group discussion about what we learned from the session, using the “Focused Conversation” technique, which involves a series of questions in the following order:
- Observations
- Reactions
- Interpretations
- Decisions
Each participant leaves with one or two specific new ideas to try upon returning to work.
Learning Objectives:
Participants learn how agile planning works in practice, but more importantly, they get a chance to experience the frustration that arises from having to make decisions with real consequences. Then, during the debrief, we explore those frustrations and how best to deal with them. Participants leave with new strategies for collaborative planning, and a new appreciation for the difficulties their product owners face.
Timing:
I’ve proposed this session for 90 minutes, but it works even better in a 180-minute slot. With 180 minutes, I introduce multiple iterations, which allows participants to see how iterating allows them to learn and improve their planning.
Session History:
I’ve delivered this session many times before, including at Agile 2007. I’m proposing it again because it’s always received good ratings from participants, it’s tons of fun, and—because participants generate much of the content—it’s different every time.