Leading Answers, an agile project management blog, has a great article that details some agile techniques for release planning exercises. Their article includes explanations and great diagrams. Check it out.
We haven’t done any of these particular exercises, but really liked the article and ideas. Especially the transition from the “Remember the Future” exercise to the “Shape the Product Tree” exercise.
Anyone tried these agile release planning techniques before? Have any success or horror stories?
I’ve created a card game similar to those diagrams, so please give it a try. https://medium.com/@dakic/35-cards-which-will-improve-your-backlog-refinement-process-and-engage-every-team-member-54f929fdd282
It’s a tool for planning a release or a sprint and get every team member on board.
Tell me what you think about it.
Hey, those cards look cool.
I think there are two common problems in backlog refinement, and they tend to be in opposition (solving one exacerbates the other). Spending too much of the team’s time to get a shared understanding of a story – making the sprint expensive. Being too shallow in analysis of stories – putting predictability and alignment to value at risk.
These cards look like they would help with the latter, but at the cost of the former.
Have you seen situations where teams get stuck and these cards help un-stick them?
Also – I really like the idea of carving out roles (recording estimates, keeping conversations on track, etc). I think I can steal that for other workshops as well, like developing contextual understanding of users and how they get value, focusing on developing solutions to identified problems, etc.
Thanks Momcilo!