Becoming Agile - Planning in An Environment with A Command and Control Culture
A colleague recently related to me his experience working with a client to make changes in the annual planning and budgeting process to support the Scrum framework that development teams follow at his company. The client is a mid-size and growing eCommerce company. They had a dozen scrum teams that had been functioning for a little under a year when they brought my friend Dave in to help during the company's annual strategic planning and budgeting cycle.
He identified these elements as essential to a successful Agile planning effort at enterprise scale at the maturity level at which the company found itself:
He identified these elements as essential to a successful Agile planning effort at enterprise scale at the maturity level at which the company found itself:
- Product Owners versed in the company's strategic objectives for the next 12 months
- Software development managers with a sense of architectural direction for the technology on which products were built
- IT operations managers with a roadmap for a more scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure
- A team of Scrum Masters/project managers, constituting the company's PMO, orienting the group around cadence, cross-team dependencies, and team capacity
The planning process followed no particular methodology but included these steps:
- Each Product Owner wrote on 3 x 5 cards features from their backlog and taped them on a wall in descending priority
- Product Owners reviewed each other's cards and discussed dependencies on other teams for feature delivery
- The Product Owner whose team needed to deliver a feature in support of another team's wrote that supporting feature on a different color card and put it in roughly the rank order required to support the primary feature
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