Playbooks provide teams the ability to define focussed ‘plays’ or experiments that are aimed at improving the team’s way of working.
Playbooks comprise three components:
Goals: set a target (or a target range) score for a metric
Guardrails: create a target range for a driver or practice that influences a metric score. This range influences your ability to achieve a goal and aims to create consistency in the way a team works.
Practices: define a qualitative target for a metric or state of working, acting as a descriptive experiment that describes a particular aspect of a team’s way of working.
Each component acts independently or can be linked to either of the other two components.
Use Playbooks to create a ‘play’ that focuses on improving how you work.
Here's how teams create a Play using Playbooks
Let’s consider a team that is struggling to complete the work they plan for each sprint. This team has had completion rate scores of less than 30% for the last 4 sprints. They can see in Umano that the sub-metric ‘Unplanned Completion Rate’ has been increasing over this time to now around 50%, and in ‘Sprint Stability’ that there is a new pattern of about 10 to 14 new feature tasks that have been added mid-sprint. Their stakeholders are increasingly frustrated because they’re not keeping up with the work being assigned to them, and the team are frustrated from a feeling of not being able to keep up with what’s expected of them.
The team meets for their next retrospective and discusses this problem and the impact this is having on both their productivity and morale.
They decide to take action.
For the next 4 sprints, they create a new Goal of a 50% Completion Rate - ‘walk before they run’ is what they’re thinking here!
The team are pragmatic, and can see from their Umano metrics that there is a usual rate of at least 20% unplanned work that gets assigned to them each sprint.
So to support this Goal, they create a new Guardrail that sets an agreed target range for ‘Accept 5 to 8 New Issues Added’ to a sprint and link this Guardrail to the Goal.
Finally, they also decide to experiment with a new Practice of a mid-sprint review with their Product Manager and create a new Practice also linked to this Goal and Guardrail:
‘PM and Eng Lead to meet mid-sprint and reprioritise new features within available unplanned capacity’.
Over the next 4 sprints, the team tracks their progress on their Completion Rate Macro Cycle Chart, which maps their actual metric performance against their goal. They use retros as a checkpoint and celebrate their learning and successes together.