The Macro Cycle Planner comprises a Planning Guide, Planning Inputs widget and Completion Predictions table.

Your Planning Guide helps your team build a longer-term plan that most closely aligns to how your team usual performs in a equivalent time period, is used to improve your team's predictability, protect your capacity and support the realignment of expectations when a setting goals to achieve for that longer-term cycle such as a quarter.
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The Planning Inputs widget gives your team the levers to experiment with the variables that most effect their longer-term 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.
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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'.
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“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” Abraham Lincoln.
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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.

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.
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 macro cycle goal.

Relevant stakeholders are involved when tradeoffs need to be made between product owners, customer priorities and the team's capacity to deliver.
Planning meetings identify capacity that might be allocated for requirement changes throughout the macro. cycle 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 macro cycle's goals as planned to allow for any final tweaks to scope or resources required to deliver the macro cycle goal.

The team’s Macro Cycle Planner is titled with the Quarter name or select months of the cycle, with a label that indicates whether that cycle is ‘In Progress’, ‘Finished’ or 'Future'. The default view will be the current macro cycle. You can select a different cycle using the navigation arrow next to the cycle name or the forward / back arrows next to the date picker.

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:

The track bar visualises the relative match between the Team Plan (sourced from your Planning Inputs widget, which can be edited for any future cycles you create) and ojo™ Suggestions (which are usual values delivered each macro cycle). This provides some instant guidance on whether this Macro Cycle has been under planned, over planned or matches the team's usual plan.
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Actual values are the average value of each closed sprint or Kanban increment for the current macro cycle.

The ‘Team Plan' is created live using the Planning Inputs widget, which is editable for any future macro cycle's you may be planning.

ojo™ provides suggested values for each of the planning categories drawn from the team’s usual performance for the equivalent historic time periods.

Indicates the variance between the Team Plan and ojo™ Suggestions.

For any future Macro Cycle, teams can experiment building their plan by editing any variables that help them design a plan and achieves a closer match between their usual plan and the ‘Future’ cycle being planned.
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Planning inputs can not be edited once a cycle moves to ‘In Progress’ (triggered by when the team commences the interval in their issue tracker) or is ‘Finished’.
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To unpack some of the Planning Inputs in a little more detail:
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This table forms the other crucial input to improving the team’s planning accuracy.
Listed are the team’s Estimate Sizes, along with their usual Cycle Time per estimate size.
This acts as a guide for when the team starts to provide initial estimates to issues assigned to the cycle during planning.
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