VMO/ Product Office plans

The Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast is back this week with an episode all about plans. In today's episode, Peter and Dave continue their series on the Value Management Office by talking about the importance of planning. They discuss how planning is critical to successfully executing a project and how having a structure rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper can aid the planning process. They also explain why it is essential to understand the framework of a plan before creating one.

This week's takeaways:

• Coordinate over short distances.
• Having a frame to drop work into can be valuable.
• Avoid blank sheets of paper
• Priorities over the medium term, decisions at the team level in the short term.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

Transcript

Peter: 0:05

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock. How are you today, Dave? I'm doing fantastically.

David: 0:21

So what about this week? What do we want to talk about? So this week, we're we want to talk about.

Peter: 0:24

So this week we're going to talk all about plans. This is a continuation of our sort of theme of the value management office that we've been talking about, and so plans, what about plans? I mean, these are critical.

David: 0:38

Well, planning. This is an interesting one, isn't it? When you talk to agile teams or when we talk to organizations which are early in their agile adoption, there's often a sort of uncertainty about planning because every time I go to the team, I can't get a plan beyond a couple of weeks out. And if I now go to the value management office, clearly their responsibility, a big part of it is that governance over where you're going to spend time and money over the coming longer period of time. So how do we get those plans in place? I think it's really important to move away from blank sheets of paper. Just come up with a plan. We have really good practices. There's good understanding of how we do planning, and we can convert either short-term plans into medium and long-term plans, or we just need to understand that framework and work within that.

Peter: 1:26

Yeah, I think this is critical because without that frame, if you just ask somebody to, hey, what could we possibly do, how might this go, then you can wind off going on a million different directions. Having some kind of frame that allows you to understand how the work might be done, how it could be jot down and create the conversation, that piece is quite a critical piece to avoid that problem of having a blank sheet of paper and not necessarily knowing where you're going to go from there For a certain circumstance. There are circumstances where a blank sheet of paper can be valuable. But if we're looking at how are we going to get this done, how are we going to get to these outcomes and develop it, then, starting with some form of framework around that can be very valuable, yeah, and what I kind of refer to, or my go-to framework, is the concept of an ordered backlog.

David: 2:25

Concept of an ordered backlog.

David: 2:25

So one of the things that I find and you don't see too much talk about this, but what I find interesting about Agile, from the team through to the organization level is there's a lot of the practices that you see at the sort of, let's say, a scrum team or any sort of Agile team level, which are self-similar as you start scaling it up so that you get this sort of fractal dimensionality in there.

David: 2:46

So what I like is the way that we plan a sprint. We've got a bunch of, let's say, stories, work, items, and breaking those down into tasks is very similar to the way we plan a quarter where, instead of stories, we've now got features or epics however you want to describe that and breaking those down over a quarter is very similar to the way we plan, let's say, a year or multi-year, where we have initiatives or we have significantly larger chunks of work broken down through the year and that sort of self-similar scaling and the model, the practices that we use at the sprint level to the practices we use at quarterly planning level, to the practices we use at the annual level are very similar. The dimensions are just different. As you go from one to the other, the scale of things is different.

Peter: 3:36

I think another element of that too is that within across groups of teams, across areas, that it's one backlog. We don't divide it up into many separate components, so you've got a consistent view of that frame, essentially.

David: 3:53

Well, it's effectively the priorities. If I take any backlog, if I use that backlog frame, then we know there's an ordered backlog and we're ordering that based if I'm a product owner based on return on investment. As we get to quarterly or annual planning, we're now basing that order priority, still based on return on investment, but now driven by business value, by organizational priorities. But we need that single set of organizational priorities and the backlog aligned around that, because if we start having too many backlogs with different organizational priorities, you can't trade off between those backlogs. So, to your point, you end up with that single organizational priority backlog which may break down into individual team backlogs as they go forward, and then that brings the next piece or the final piece in that planning which is coordinating activity over short timeframe.

David: 4:49

So there's no point different parts of the organization planning three quarters ahead. They need to plan in the current quarter and in fact they probably have to plan over the current sprint or two sprints rather than looking. You know where will we be six months from now? That's something that's going to emerge. We don't know right now. Priorities might change, we may uncover things, opportunities will change and shift.

Peter: 5:13

I think another key element here, too, is the importance of actually doing the planning, that the planning itself is the valuable exercise, the plan that comes out of that less so, but the planning actually coming together, having the discussion, ensuring you've got alignment and understanding of what the work is to be done and so that you can create that prioritized backlog, is the critical piece in all of this. That actual planning activity.

David: 5:40

I love that that whole conversation is so critical and this speaks to. We hear a lot about the cost of things like big room planning and not to want to go into that particular direction. The value in that is often not really well understood, which is, the whole team understands what the priorities are. So we need to do just enough of those conversations so that we can understand what other parts of our organization or our value stream are, what they're struggling with, what their objectives are and how they're going to impact what we're doing and how our work impacts what they are doing. And that can't be tied to one or two leads on a team.

Peter: 6:19

The whole team kind of needs to be aware of it and what's going on, john Cutler published an interesting blog post on this, one of his somewhat random thoughts, which I thought was, as so many of the things he does are quite well articulated. Uh, but there's this idea that we we so often find ourselves with these one hour meetings because that's the only time that we can spare we can't possibly spare more than an hour and yet we end up at the end of that hour not having actually got to the point of the sufficient alignment and sufficient understanding, uh, whereas if and so we end up with a week later coming back together with none of the decisions and none of the actions that I can take place, whereas if we'd actually said, okay, we're going to spend three hours together and we're going to hash all of this out, we're going to work it all out and actually do the planning well and put that effort in that that that time is well spent and it's absolutely invaluable.

David: 7:15

Yeah, I think I just love what you're saying there and there's sort of two things that come to it. Number one is having enough time to get the discussion that's needed. But there's also an ownership of the discussion there when I leave that meeting as recognizing that that was the meeting where we discussed dependencies or priorities or technical breakdown of X, Y and Z or whatever it is. And we'd better be there with our full brain, engaged for that discussion and also prepared to take on the notes that we need and the observations and all of the other bits and pieces, so that we're not, you know, focused on something else and not really coming to grips with what the topic of conversation is, and I do think that there's a lot of. We sometimes lose the focus in discussion and the focus in those conversations in that sort of meeting culture where, like you say, it's an hour block, because my tool for booking meetings books an hour.

Peter: 8:12

Yeah, and away we go. I had a half hour, one of those this afternoon, so with that in mind, how would you sum this up in three or so points for our listeners?

David: 8:22

Well, I think the last point that you mentioned is possibly the most important one, which is you need to plan, there needs to be a conversation. This idea that everything is quote unquote emergent is not sufficient. We need to have some idea of the stepping stones that we're trying to take and the direction that we're trying to go, and so on. The second point would be we already have a frame for those planning conversations and that's that fractal, self-similar sort of view of things, which is we know how a backlog works. We know a backlog has a bunch of similarly sized pieces into it in the backlog which are ordered based on priority or value to the organization or the customer. Well, that same self-similar model can be used at a quarterly level, can be used at an annual level. Quarterly level can be used at an annual level. And so on.

David: 9:12

So there is already a framework within which to do that planning and there's a well-understood conversations and structure in that approach. And the third thing I think is the coordination across multiple parts of the organization teams, if you like which is short term. There's no point coordinating over the medium to long term we need a view on it but our coordination efforts need to be in that short term in order to get the value out of the door and coordinate dependencies and so on between those entities.

Peter: 9:48

Yeah, and those dependencies and identifying them are, of course, one of the key things that you're looking to get out of planning. So thank you as always, dave, that was a wonderful conversation. Really enjoyed it. If anyone wishes to reach out, they can at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom. And until next time, always a pleasure.

David: 10:08

Thanks, Peter.

Peter: 10:09

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.