Planner Tool Introduction
The TeamX Planner tool comprises a Planning Guide, Planning Inputs widget and Completion Predictions table.
Your Active Cycle Planning Guide helps your team build an interval plan that most closely aligns to your usual performance. It is used prior to or during your interval planning ceremony to improve your team's predictability, protect your capacity and support the realignment of expectations when an interval is 'over planned' or 'under planned'.
The Planning Inputs widget gives teams the levers to experiment with the variables that most effect their interval plan and ability to deliver successfully. When in 'edit' mode, teams can change their planning inputs to see what changes are required to more closely align the interval's plan to their usual.
The Completion Predictions table summarises the total person days estimated to complete the assigned issues to the interval, based on the quantity of issues per estimate bracket, and your team's usual Cycle Time per estimate. This is used as an input to your Planning Guide's 'Predicted Time to Complete'.
Why Planning Matters
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” Abraham Lincoln.
Preparation is a key differentiator between those teams that are able to deliver according to plan, even when needing to remain responsive to customer and stakeholder feedback.
Teams that demonstrate effective planning practices are observed to form delivery behaviours that are predictable, accountable and confident when managing and aligning stakeholder expectations.
What ‘good’ Planning looks like
Effective team planning comes down to the teams ability to retain an incremental, iterative approach. Accordingly, teams plan continuously, making constant adjustments as changes arise.
Interval Planning is a key ceremony for Agile teams. It creates alignment on priorities, confirms understanding of scope of requirements and ensures the right resources are available to deliver according to the interval goal.
Relevant stakeholders are involved when tradeoffs need to be made between product owners, customer priorities and the team's capacity to deliver.
Planning ceremonies identify capacity that might be allocated for requirement changes throughout the interval based on feedback from customers and end users.
It's helpful to take a measure of the team's confidence in being able to deliver the interval as planned to allow for any final tweaks to scope or resources required to deliver the interval goal.
Interval planning ceremonies are short (ideally no longer than 1hr) and focussed. This ceremony's efficiency is enabled by a separate backlog grooming meeting that occurs prior between the product owners and team leaders where they set the interval goal and 'groom' the possible issues and tasks required to be carried out by the team.
Planner Tool in Detail
The team’s Planner is titled with the name of the interval, with a label that indicates whether that interval is ‘In Progress’, ‘Finished’ or 'Future'. The default view will be the current interval. You can select a different interval using the navigation arrow next to the interval name or the forward / back arrows next to the date picker.
Planning Guide
The Planning Guide acts as your calculator to help create an accurate predictable plan based on a set of inputs. The available capacity you have to spend on designing, building and reviewing work items is typically split on the following inputs:
inherited issues that are still ‘to-do’ or that are ‘in progress’
new issues and story points or time estimates that are required to meet the interval goal
total defects
The radial graph visualises the relative match between the Team Plan (sourced live from your Issue Tracker) and Ojo Suggestions. This provides some instant guidance on whether this interval has been under planned, over planned or matches their usual plan.
Team Plan
The ‘Team Plan' is sourced live directly from the Team’s newly created interval in their Issue Tracker. If teams practice Kanban, this is being sourced from the tickets that are currently on the board if Backlog is enabled and if Backlog is not enabled, we exclude the tickets in statuses that you select as backlog statuses that you choose when setting up the project.
Ojo Suggestions
Ojo, TeamX’s automated assistant, is providing suggested values for each of the planning categories drawn from the team’s usual performance.
Variance
Indicates where the Team’s plan is above, below or matching their usual planning variables, as indicated by Ojo Suggestions.
Predicted time to Complete
The predicted time to complete is calculated using,
the amount of time that each story point-sized issue usually takes,
the number of issues belonging to each story point size,
if there are issues without story points, then the time it takes is calculated using the usual cycle time it takes for the team to complete an issue,
the number of people assigned to complete issues in the intervals.
Planner Guide Modifications for Kanban Teams
Inherited Issues are the issues that are in-progress when the previous interval is completed.
New Issues are the issues that are in the To-Do column excluding the tickets that belong to backlog statutes.
Depending on the issues in progress and in the To-Do column, the planning widget will predict whether you’re over/under flow or a match.
Planning Inputs
For any future interval created in a team's Issue Tracker, TeamX mirrors this interval in the Planner. Before an interval starts in their Issue Tracker, Teams can switch the toggle at the top of the Planning Guide across from Issue Tracker to Planning Inputs, converting the Planning Inputs widget into an editable state. Teams can then experiment with any variables that help them design a plan that achieves a closer match between their usual plan and the ‘Future’ interval being planned. View the radial chart in the Planner Guide to observe any edits made to Planning Inputs widget.
Planning inputs can not be edited once an interval moves to ‘In Progress’ (triggered by when the team commences the interval in their issue tracker) or is ‘Finished’ when the team completes their interval in their Issue Tracker.
To unpack some of the Planning Inputs in a little more detail:
Capacity: Percentage work left to complete is taken from the team’s actual capacity metric, aggregating time spent and planned time left to spent on all issues still 'in progress' at interval completion
Strategic Focus: Focus on Features is calculated from the number of defects assigned to the interval relative to the total number of issues assigned
Estimation Adjustment: this is a user generated adjustment that can come from the team's Estimate Accuracy score, along with any additional context the team may have
Confidence to Completion is your team’s shared view of how confident they are to complete the planned interval. Whilst it has no bearing on the Planning Guide, it is a value that is saved and can therefore be tracked when scrolling through this page for prior intervals.
Completion Predictions
This table forms the other crucial input to improving the team’s planning accuracy and forms an input into the Planning Guide’s Predicted Time to Complete.
Listed are the team’s Estimate Sizes, along with their usual Cycle Time per estimate size, and the quantity of issues assigned to this interval in that Estimate size. The Total represents the total number of human days predicted to complete the assigned issues.
