Planning is important for all projects, even agile ones. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen so many worthless plans that we’d like to throw planning out altogether. But let’s not give up yet. It is possible to create a project plan that looks forward six to nine months yet is accurate and useful. This one day course will give you insight as to some common reasons traditional planning approaches fail and introduce you to some practices that really do work.

Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams. In this seminar, you will learn how to break that cycle by acquiring new skills that will help you to create reliable plans for improved decision-making. You will leave with a solid understanding of and experience in agile release planning and iteration planning. We will learn various approaches to estimating, including unit-less points and ideal time. You’ll discover four techniques for deriving estimates, including the popular Planning Poker technique. Together, we’ll explore planning techniques that dramatically increase a project’s chances of on-time completion.

PMPs: This course counts for 8 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Resume responsibility as an agile team member
• Act as a team player on the “planning game”
• Release and Sprint Planning Techniques
• Improve meetings

• Brief recap of scrum concepts and agile
• Core agile values – why scrum works (and how not to sabotage it)
• Self-organisation
• Learning organization
• Visibility and trust
• Iterative and evolutionary development
• Timeboxing
• Value and risk reduction focus

Focus on - Release Planning

• Requirements gathering and improvement
• Story. Acceptance test, documentation
• Improving stories
• Prioritization – how to help business
• Estimation – techniques and units
• Working with velocity and relative points
• Length of sprints
• Dependencies
• Technical concerns

Sprint Planning

• Techniques, units
• Working with Ideal time and planning poker
• Dependencies

Changing Sprints

• Maintenance, bugs… and planning
• Agile techniques and larger products
• Collaboration among teams
• Supporting techniques

Improving meetings

• Retrospective techniques – issues and action planning
• Agile reporting
• Running tested features
• Big visible charts (burn up, burn down – release and sprints)
• Velocity over time