Quarterly planning

In this episode of Definitely Maybe Agile, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock explore the evolution of quarterly planning from traditional PI planning events to more streamlined modern approaches. They discuss how effective quarterly planning reveals organizational dependencies, aligns priorities across teams, and helps maintain focus on delivering value. The hosts share insights on avoiding common pitfalls like over-planning future work and emphasize the importance of maintaining flexibility while ensuring clear direction for immediate execution.

This week´s takeaways:

• Clear, sequenced priorities shared across teams - focus on completing initiatives before starting new ones
• Detailed planning for immediate work (1-2 months), with less detail for future months
• Active dependency management to identify and address bottlenecks early

Chapters

• 0:04 Quarterly Planning in Agile Organizations
• 7:57 Strategic Planning in Agile Organizations

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

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, Dave.

Dave: 0:13

How are you? Excellent, excellent, good to see you again, good to catch up. What are we talking about today?

Peter: 0:20

We're going to talk about quarterly planning, because this is kind of a beginning of the year type thing. Right, it's the like we've got a lot of stuff coming up, so what's going to happen next?

Dave: 0:31

Well, it's interesting that we're touching on this. I would say a lot of the conversations that we're having nowadays is you know, everyone can plan around a sprint. They can plan the next couple of weeks or month or so, um, but now just being able to look a little longer term and there's that whole, you know, if you remember big room planning and and these pi planning events, which were literally events, they were multi-day, hundreds of people, um, and I think it's interesting that you, we needed that just to kind of iron out the wrinkles in what's involved in quarterly planning. But I think quarterly planning is a different beast nowadays.

Peter: 1:11

I would agree with you. I think the as made famous by SAFE, a PI planning type multi-day event with all of the people in the room it has its place and if you've been through one of these it's quite an experience given. It's very structured, it takes you through this. It creates things like the dependency board, so like where all the times we're going to be dependent is our 10 weeks plus two weeks type things. We've got all of our five sprints plus another one to figure out what we're going to do for the next one, and then you've got a whole structure put in there into that sort of getting ready for that planning event, and a lot of it is about understanding what all the dependencies are across all of these different people and all these different teams that are having to come together to do this. I think with horizon planning and the quarterly planning type events, it's a much more condensed version of that with a much tighter focus.

Dave: 2:12

Yeah, I find it. I mean, we often talk about Agile or DevOps versus the sort of project managed world, and one of the things that I always find quite interesting is, um, how uh little information is out in an organization about what they'll be doing. And if we're in january, let's say if we look at february and march, what's actually going to be happening, which kind of goes counterintuitive to the idea that we have a project plan and we can look at it. I think that if I kind of follow through on that, the big difference is that I can go and ask for a project plan for a single initiative or project and we'll have a look at it.

Dave: 2:54

And then I can go into the next conversation and pull up a project plan for a different initiative or project and so on and we can go and look at all of these project plans over January, february and March. But the quarterly planning aspect is much more holistic. It's looking at all of the activities that we have across, let's say a department or a group of teams or whatever it might be.

Peter: 3:18

And, as we know as well, the project plans are generally just wishful thinking anyway, because by the time we actually get into them we realize that they're not. So there's a I don't know for sure what's going to be coming, and if I look at all of the different ones, it becomes very hard to see across all of that. I've got to somehow remember what's supposed to be happening. X, number of.

Dave: 3:41

I mean, actually you identified it when you described what that product increment, that PI planning experience is, which is dependency, visualizing the dependencies. The thing that slows an organization if you've got an organization of 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people working towards an end goal, the thing that slows them down is the dependencies, not the. My project plan is bigger, better, different to your project plan. It's how do those project plans interact and what are the skills, the functions, whatever it might be, that are going to be unavailable when we need them in a project plan over here and this is what I I really like about quarterly planning is it all of a sudden highlights what your bottlenecks are, what the dependencies, where your dependencies are are kind of critical to the delivery path that you've got?

Peter: 4:37

yeah, well, it creates that conversation, um around. Okay, this is all the work. Which bits of this work are most critical? Which bits of these work have dependencies? And other bits work. Where are we going to start? What are we going to do next? And that helps with understanding, and, especially if you bring the right people into the room, everybody's now aware of where it is they're going to go, what it is they've got to do, who do they need to rely on for whatever other pieces there are? There is, of course, a secondary piece we could probably talk about on another podcast around. Well, now that I can see these dependencies, I should be looking about how I eliminate them as they are well, I, I know even before we get there, because, yes, absolutely, we should talk a little bit about that.

Dave: 5:23

What I what I find interesting through the quarterly planning exercise is lightweight as you can make it is. You also start seeing what different parts of your organization's priorities are, because now you're really, you're kind of laying bare, if you like, what the organization is trying to achieve, what is agreed. You know what people say are the highest priorities versus the behaviors and how they actually act, because you start exposing for example, I'm just thinking of an organization that I've been working with recently where there are critical roles who have very clearly different instructions being given to them as to what the priorities are. So you start recognizing that the dependencies and the, the difficulty of getting key functions, key, key individuals involved in a piece of work that needs delivering, for example, isn't about the individuals involved. It really is.

Peter: 6:21

It's about the direction they're being given and the priorities that they're chasing yeah which are not shared and aren't as visible to everybody else necessarily yeah, and I the other time that you see that is where you've got teams who have got conflicting priorities by their hierarchies telling them to do one thing, but the team crosses and even though they're cross-functional except they've got now multiple different competing incentives, and so that often I've seen that cause problems on many occasions. So, yes, the quarterly planning gives you an opportunity to bring these all together, and so you bring your business and technology and your product people into the room together to talk about what are we doing, where are we going? Where are dependencies? What are the risks we have? What does all of that look like? What are we going to undertake next and how does that align to what we're trying to achieve overall?

Dave: 7:15

Yeah, in fact, the way you're describing it sounds like it's one meeting with everybody kind of turning out. But I often sort of think of it as three separate conversations.

Dave: 7:25

The first one is if you think of it from a product owner or for a leadership perspective, which is what is the list of priorities and that's you know, what do we, what's the thing that we do first, the thing we do second, and so on, so that there's that sort of um, whether you call it a roadmap or it's a backlog of initiatives and you can handle a couple of initiatives in parallel potentially, depending on scale and so on, but basically what are the priorities that are expected to be worked on over the next few months? The second piece that I look for is how the teams manage their workload, kind of month to month, maybe sprint to sprint, certainly in the first couple of sprints. But we never lose too much time about writing stories for March. If we're in January, I don't see much value in that. I might have some stories stretching into February, but anything at that granularity just feels like overkill.

Dave: 8:22

But I should certainly know, you know, know what's the sort of core focus of each sprint or each month as you're going forward, so we can see that sort of work cascading through individuals or departments that are essential to getting something out of the door or getting approval, or coordinating the deliverable from this group with the deliverable from a second group so that you can get, you know, a bigger, better thing out of the door and those three conversations what are the priorities, what are the teams going to be focused on from month to month and sprint to sprint, and what are the dependencies we have have to manage give you a really great idea of what things are expected, what the what it should look like over the next few months.

Peter: 9:10

Yeah, and that combined with an understanding of how much can we get like what's done, like what is going to be next. Because if we think of and I've seen this done in a variety of ways, I quite like the frost line way of doing it to say that these are things that we're not going to take on yet, but then next, should this work turn out to be easier than we thought it was, here's the thing that's brought in. If we, if we, uh, if we have sufficient capacity and again, we've talked about that I think you and I have very different ways.

Dave: 9:43

Normally, what I'm ending up doing is working with a group and we'll end up going month one, month two, month three and, just to let you know, month three is really month four yeah, well, this is now next later roll into month three. Yeah, but you're obviously way better at this than I am. So you can say month one, month two, month three, and we'll bring some other stuff in.

Peter: 10:03

I think and then here's the other stuff we would like to see happen. Yeah, it does, because, because we're looking at this on a on a rolling basis, right as we we start to view it and see what's what's happening there. But yeah, the I often I typically use the now, next later or now next never, because by the time we get closer to that, we're going to have a better understanding of what that now needs to become and to move us to where we're going. But it is always that and as you were describing earlier, the stuff that's further out you spend a lot less effort in defining. I have seen it where people have defined like here's 200 stories and I'm going to define all of them in excruciating detail, and then they literally come back to it a year later and it's like, well, this isn't any of the things that we need to do now, because all of the underlying systems have changed and so you end up.

Dave: 10:57

Well, it's interesting because there's a whole bunch of things that starts happening as you're going through. One is I've worked with organizations where they'd rather plan a future thing than do the current thing. Yes, so you then suddenly find a huge proportion of their capacity is dedicated to wishes months five, six and seven, let's say instead of focused on let's finish the stuff that's in front of us, and there's definitely, you know, there's value in look ahead and a little bit of research and so on. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but so many organizations, if some idea comes up that isn't approved. But now we're going to spend a few sprints putting a proof of concept together for something that may or may not happen, when we've already got work that is essential, that needs to be done. That's a kind of a big problem yeah, well, it's the.

Peter: 11:51

Uh. I wonder some of its uh human psychology right, it's the new shiny thing. Looks good, let's work on that. It's fun yeah.

Dave: 11:59

Well and this is where I mean I always then look at the governance side of quarterly planning, and that governance side is you find out very, very quickly that your plan is nothing like reality.

Peter: 12:13

Yeah, and if you're doing something large like renovating a large system and there's many, many moving parts and it's a project in the tens of millions of dollars of work and spread across many, many teams, yeah, there's a lot of work that needs to go into that. It becomes awfully complex very, very, very quickly and so you're going to need to pay a lot of work that needs to go into that. It becomes awfully complex very, very, very quickly and so you're going to need to pay a lot of attention as it's going through and understanding and coming back and rethinking about what's next.

Dave: 12:47

Well, and you need stability in those situations as well, because this is something that the other thing that I see so often is pivoting to follow the whims of the organization, however that might come at you. And so, just as an example, one of the things that you hear a lot about right now, especially in Canada, is productivity and the fact that productivity is not where it could be. However, you want to choose, you choose to measure productivity across the workforce, and what I find comes really clear when you do quarterly planning is you find productivity isn't how hard you work. It's are you working on things that get out of the door versus are you working on things that you start working on and then you stop and you move to something else, and you find that there's actually quite a significant proportion of work that is started is never complete, and if we reduce that, basically your productivity of your organization is going to go up.

Peter: 13:48

Yeah, you know pretty much what you start.

Dave: 13:51

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Peter: 13:53

So how would you wrap this up in three points for our audience?

Dave: 13:59

Well, I mentioned those three things right at the beginning, right? So if I think of quarterly planning, I think first of all. So let me just touch on these again. One is do you know the sort of list of priorities and are they sequentially put together so that you're not trying to start 100 items all?

Dave: 14:16

at once, but you're doing a small number and finishing it and moving to the next, and moving to the next. So that's that sequence of priorities which is shared and understood across all of the teams involved. Number two is does each of those teams know, roughly, the work, the order of work that they are going to be committing to? Because they're going to be committing to, because they're going to want to measure progress against that? I kind of view that as a baseline for each of the teams, so they can see are they having a good quarter or are they struggling for whatever reason. And then the third thing is dependencies. Pulling out those dependencies and making sure that conversation is frequent is exposing the dependencies, managing them proactively, um, and not allowing, like so many times you get this sort of excuses and reasons are accepted for not moving something out of the way, and yet the end result is, you know, missed, missed commitments or delays in those commitments being done, and so that just needs that conversation needs to be, like, I think, much more direct and and uh frequent.

Peter: 15:23

I think the one I'd add that was the um define more detailed stuff that's closer and spend less time on the stuff that's further away. Uh, I think that's another key aspect of this. Yeah, other than that, I think we covered a lot of the key points around that, so if there's nothing else to add, we could wrap up for the discussion.

Dave: 15:47

Fair enough, okay, until next time.

Peter: 15:49

Until next time. Thanks, dave. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, P eter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.