RallyDev.com
Mon 29 Nov 2010
N levels of Agile planning and beyond
I’ve been pretty passionate about collaboration and knowledge flow throughout the decades of my technical life. This passion led me to author Collaboration Explained. Now I value playing with and applying a variety of visioning, planning, and learning models in Agile organizations. My reading has focused on models for individuals and organizations in how they create flow of value in 21st century businesses. For me, there could be no better place than the Agile context in which to apply these models of rich knowledge sharing. Complex Agile organizations need to consider diverse models that can effectively guide how they plan and deliver.
Agile planning helps us scale and mature across the organization
With this in mind, I’m excited to announce a new series about N levels of Agile planning. I’ll be co-authoring the series with my Rally colleagues Ben Carey, Zach Nies and other Rally folks. Ben, Zach and I want to share some of our informal conversations around Enterprise Agile planning, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. That means we’ll be blogging about various models we think can be useful for capturing and tracking Agile business value up and down the organization. Our suspicion is that useful scaling and maturing models coupled with overall team practices bring great value at a variety of levels within an Enterprise Agile organization.
In this series, we’ll share direct experience in applying our models both within Rally and with Rally customers. That means we’ll share some insights about collections of practices at the various levels of Agile planning. We’ll also provide guidance around the Rally services and tooling we believe support planning in continuously innovative, value-driven organizations. Also, be sure to check out Ryan Martens’s series about Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level. Ryan and others will be providing on-going guidance about Rally’s “Project Stratus” tool for road mapping and other strategic practices specifically for Enterprise Agile beyond Release planning.
Ben, Zach and I don’t believe we are the sole experts on this topic!
We’re exposing our frank conversations in hopes of gaining your reactions, insights and feedback. You probably already know about some of Rally’s existing guidance on Agile planning. We just want to dig a little deeper, play a little more with these perspectives and some new approaches that could help you innovate your own Enterprise Agile adoption. While we do this, we’ll be reporting on how we are experimenting with these models here at Rally in our own practices using our own tools and our own services as well as new practices.
Look for our first blog in the next few days describing the overall model of “Why, How, and What” in positioning the value of Enterprise Agile planning. How many levels of planning will emerge in our exploration, and what will they look like? We aren’t yet prepared to declare in a definitive fashion. Instead, we’ll peek into that together with your input.
Join us as we go into N levels of Agile planning and beyond. We’re looking forward to great dialogue with you through the comments you bring.
Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka
Is the current ‘scaling’ interest by multiple agilistas perhaps symptomatic of early and particularist thinking within or among the agile alliance?
It is reasonable to say “Agility works, so we need to figure out how to scale it.” Just as reasonable is to say “Successful agile practices are incomplete or inconsistent for large or long term product development.” I suspect neither is completely true; some practices will scale and some will need be replaced.
Skip, thanks for your comment and apologies for my late reply. “Scaling” does seem to be an Agile buzzword these days doesn’t it? Back in 2004 in my “youth” ;-), I worked with our Rally founder Ryan Martens thinking about how the daily and iteration levels of planning just weren’t sufficient forwhat we were seeing. I was seeing struggles at my clients; Ryan was seeing struggles within the Rally engineering team. We put our heads together and recognized that, at the very least, we needed to move up a level to Release planning. It is just one of my favorite planning activities in Agile! Oddly, I believe this is now widely accepted as an Agile practice. I am not trying to say we were the first to think of it. I just know we discovered we couldn’t live without it.
We expanded this notion of “levels of planning” beyond daily, iteration, and release to include 2 more levels: roadmap planning and vision planning. Here again, we responded to a “pull” from where Agile was being used rather than deciding in a vacuum what the levels of planning should be.
I want to say here that, for me, this wasn’t about “scaling” Agile. Rather, it was about placing Agile in a larger context. Does this make sense? Our goal was to help individual teams create greater visibility for themselves and for the business. For Ryan and me, this was about Agile maturity. We felt this was quintessential before there could be any discussion about “scaling” Agile.
With our “5 Levels of Planning” in place in 2006, we then baked a lot of internal practice, client experience, and lean thinking research into what it would look like to mature and THEN scale agile adoptions. That meant we could now talk about teams of teams, programs, and enterprises. This became our work on 5-steps for Agile Enterprise Adoption and guided a great deal of our perspectives on applying “Flow, Pull, and Innovate” for maturing and scaling.
So, I love your second paragraph of your comment. Paraphrasing: scaling agile is a thing worth thinking about; expanding current agile practices for long term product development is also worth researching and articulating. They aren’t necessarily the same thing. And neither is sufficient unto itself. And yes, practices will evolve and emerge as we allow an organic view of an Agile system to evolve and emerge. My next post on “Why, How, What” will touch on my philosophy about what should guide us, I hope!
Thank you,
Jean
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Let me start by thanking you for initiating and enabling outside-the-box thinking to ensure our profession and those in it are kaizeners.
My knee jerk reaction to identifying, defining and maybe even codifying n-levels of agile planning and beyond needs to start with what an individual, team and enterprise define agile to be.
Some folks think agile starts once requirements, analysis and design are done. Some folks think agile starts once a project has been funded and resources assigned and allocated. Some folks think agile starts when you are conceptualizing the product.
As we move forward with our thinking about n-levels of agile planning and beyond we might to brainstorm n-types of agile and then for each their respective levels of planning.
Take care,
Russell Pannone
Russell, thank you for this great reply. You are spot on. As we nudge ourselves towards a larger expanse of what planning means in Agile, it must per force engage parts of business and product planning that had not been explicitly named in our first Agile canons. For the time being, I use the number N for the levels of planning in order to leave that door open with regard to what business planning may look like in an Agile context. This allows me to hold some space for what product planning might look like. Certainly, I believe we must now accept that Agile planning is not in the team alone.
I’m not sure I fully understand what you mean by n-types of Agile and then the number of levels of planning each might beg. Could you tell me more about that? My thinking currently has me stick with a base around Agile being the Agile values and the Agile principles. The practices come from there. That includes planning practices. I am not so sure planning practices would change dramatically based on a “type” of Agile.
However, hold that thought! I am going to play with this a bit more in my next post about the “Why, How, and What” with regard to N-levels of Planning.
Thanks,
Jean