Increment Planning

In an ideal world, all of the candidate user stories will be perfectly defined and understood, and all of the preparatory work will have been done by the business in advance. It is often the case, though, that there is not quite universal understanding of all the stories, and some clarification is required before the size of each can be estimated.

For my project, being a redesign of a part of our web site, the business have created mock-ups of what the new pages should look like, in some cases with HTML and CSS, which of course makes integrating them into the final solution that much easier, and more accurate. It is very worthwhile getting the business to provide a visual representation of the solution they want – it is an invaluable aid to understanding.

It is also very worthwhile discussing the candidate stories about a week in advance of the start of the Increment. My project plan showed timebox 4 (in Increment 1) finishing on the Wednesday, and timebox 5 (the first for Increment 2) starting on the Thursday. In reality, timebox 5 will have to kick-off a day of two later, to accommodate the story analysis and increment planning.

Representation from all key stakeholders is essential. We have a number of stories which generated some animated discussion between two different business areas. Resolving these discussions is essential to determining how the solution will be developed; without everyone’s active participation, there is a very real risk of developing the wrong solution.

Ensure you have enough time. Plan on a full day to get the most out of it.

It is essential that you do not get drawn into too much detail at this point. The objective is to ensure that everyone understands the requirements, and the stories for the first timebox can be selected. It is not meant to be a design discussion. If conversation starts getting bogged-down in detail, move on.

A facilitator helps enormously. Without a structure to it, these sessions can break down into mere discussions, with no direction or meaningful progress. Increment planning should have an agenda something like this :

• Introductions – make sure everyone on the project team is present and knows who everyone else is and their role, both on the project and in the meeting.
• Functional Overview – opportunity for the business to provide an overview (preferably visual) of the objectives of the Increment.
• Candidate Stories – the Business Ambassador presents each candidate story. Ensure that everyone present understands the requirement of each story – understanding how it will be delivered is not necessary at this stage.
• Estimation – generate estimates of the relative size and complexity of each story. This can be in ideal-days or in story points. I prefer story points, because it provides an objective measure of progress. These estimates are also essential to ensuring that there is sufficient ‘contingency’ available in the form of ‘could have’ stories.
• Prioritisation – MoSCoW prioritise each story according to its business benefit and contribution to the business vision.
• Selection – based on technical or business dependencies and priorities, select the user stories that will be delivered in the first timebox.

So, in summary:

• Get the Business to prepare their stories and any visual aids in advance
• Plan for a full-day session ahead of the actual Increment start date.
• Ensure all stakeholders are present, as well as the entire project team, including testers
• Get a neutral facilitator to run the session.
• Don’t get into any discussions about designing the solution. Just understand the requirements.

Increments and Timeboxes

Having divided the entire Prioritised Story List into three distinct Themes (or Increments in technical speak), we have just finished work on the first increment. Well, sort of. We have deployed the last of our stories into our test environment, but there are still some bugs outstanding, so we will be dedicating some time to fixing those over the next week or so before we put it live.

So we have now arrived at another Increment boundary and I have learned another lesson: Increment planning should be done in advance! Until yesterday, I was under the impression that we should ignore the second increment until we were finished with the first. But yesterday’s planning session was slow going. I also made the mistake of confusing it with a timebox kick-off, so I was expecting too much from the session.

It is therefore important to distinguish between an Increment Planning session (in which the candidate user stories are reviewed, clarified, understood, and prioritised), and a Timebox kick-off, in which the stories selected for development within the upcoming timebox are broken down into development tasks and estimated.

My next post will contain a few guidelines for conducting Increment Planning sessions.

Am I Agile by nature?

Traditional project management methods emphasise control. There are a myriad of processes and tools (with attendant templates) to impose control over the chaos that is typical of the average IT project.

Not least of these is the bizarre addiction to MS Project. I know few people who use it well, and even fewer who actually like using it. I hated it! Still do. A company I worked for until recently insisted that all projects use one of three templates (and had a department monitoring adherence - QA they called it!!). The different templates were intended to be used for different types or sizes of project, and differed in the number of standard tasks that were listed.

The problem with MS Project templates of course is the tailoring needed to make them fit the reality of the project you are planning. And in typical waterfall projects the plan tends to change on an all-too-frequent basis. I found myself having to manage the plan, rather than the project, because that was what the company expected of me. How unproductive is that?

I knew that there was a problem with this approach to project management - this management by template - I just didn’t know how to express it. In essence, it takes away our focus on the most important element of any project – the people. It forces managers to focus on the administration, the bureaucracy, the paperwork.

In our fairly extreme implementation of Agile practices, MS Project is not used at all. Our planning is done on two levels:

• How much overall work is there, how long will it take, and how many people are required?
• What detailed tasks are we going to work on within the next timebox (1-4 weeks)

Now that I am able to more simply monitor – not control – the task plan, I am utilising my time to better effect. I am more effective in leading the team forward, and I am happier as a result. Perhaps I was born an Agilist?

Agile Software development – high-level planning

As at the point described in my last post, we had created a pile of story cards, representing a Prioritised Requirements List (PRL). Each story had associated with it relative benefit to the business, a story-point estimate of relative size and complexity, and a MoSCoW-scale prioritisation, a DSDM concept.

Now, how are we going to deliver solutions to these requirements, and just as importantly, when?

Our first task was to group all of the user stories into ‘Themes’ of related requirements. This is so that we can decide what functionality can be released into Production together. In our case, requirements or features of particular parts of the site were grouped into Themes. Those stories referring to features of the new Home page went in Theme 1, those related to up-sell and Claims (did I mention we are an Insurance company) went in Theme 2, and those related to Amendments went in Theme 3. Generally speaking, Theme 1 should be the most important and deliver the biggest benefit, but in our case, although it does deliver business benefit in its own right, it is more an enabler for Theme 2, when the big benefit is realised.

Themes are also known as Increments or Releases. I am inclined to use the term Themes when referring to user stories with the Business, and Increments when talking to the technical guys, but the terms are largely interchangeable.

From what I have read so far, all Agile methods (XP, or eXtreme Programming, Scrum, DSDM, etc.) have in common the concept of working in short periods of time called timeboxes or iterations. DSDM calls them timeboxes, so I will adhere to that term here. Each Increment comprises a number of timeboxes, so that a theme develops incrementally over a number of timeboxes until it is in a cohesive state, when it can be delivered to Production.

Within each timebox, a sub-set of requirements (stories) is analysed in detail, the solution is designed, developed and tested, and preferably deployed. DSDM differs from the others in that it allows for the probability that work will take longer than estimated but allows for contingency in the form of additional, lower-priority user stories (Could Have’s).

What we are trying to establish at this early stage is “how big is this project, and when can we deliver it?”

To get the answer to this question, it is necessary to translate the story points into a measure of duration. This brings to the fore the slippery subject of estimating. To estimate the effort involved in delivering all of the stories listed (we had over 50 of them) would have taken virtually an entire day. We therefore adopted the idea of estimating only the stories in Theme 1. This would give us a reasonably accurate estimate (with a 70% confidence) of a delivery date for that Theme or Increment. I then took the total story point count for Theme 1, and divided it into the total effort estimated to give a ratio, that I then applied to the total story point count for the stories in the other Increments.

I then played around with some figures in Excel (as managers are wont to do), to try to work out the best duration for each timebox. Generally it is better to have short timeboxes than long ones, and for completely the wrong reasons (don’t even go there), I settled on a standard duration of ten working days.

Knowing how long each timebox would last, how many people were assigned to the project (three, plus a part-time tech lead), and the estimated effort required, I could easily calculate that we would need 11 timeboxes to deliver the entire project.

Right, that’s the high-level planning done. Now for the detail.

Agile Methods

Agile, as a development concept, has been around for more than 10 years now, and there are a number of different frameworks for being Agile. Basically, they differ only in the level of formality they prescribe. A decent comparison of the more popular methods is provided here

Our company has decided to standardise on DSDM Atern as the framework of choice. As you will read throughout this series of posts, I have deviated from the DSDM ‘gospel’, or introduced practices from other methods if I think they will be of value.

My chief criticism of DSDM Atern is that, like PRINCE2, it is heavy with deliverable products or artefacts. Atern prescribes the production of an awful lot of documents, which we are either scaling down considerably, or doing away with altogether. I hope to be able to describe what we are producing at each stage of the project life cycle as we go through it.

Agile - the start

I was surprisingly calm about the prospects of having to start managing projects at a new company and learn a completely new methodology as well. I had done it before, but all my previous employers used big, heavyweight frameworks high on process and bureaucracy. You don't have to think too much; you just follow the process. Like a robot. Agile is different. This company is different.

This is the first in a series of posts, in which I will describe how we adopted Agile in this company, and in what aspects we deviated from the ‘textbook’ approach and why. In this first post, I will run through the initial estimating workshops.

Agile textbooks suggest that the process begins with the initial idea for the project – the users should not know too much about the requirements too soon. In this case, a fair amount of thought had already gone into what the requirements were. The product owners were given a template into which they wrote a series of bullet-point requirements, essentially user-stories. The template was broken down by stakeholder, so that we could identify Customers requirements separately from Finance or Underwriting requirements, for example.

For companies adopting an Agile approach for the first time, it is essential that you get someone who understands the approach and how to adapt it. You will need someone to help guide you along the way and suggest how to do things to achieve the best results. In our case, we have nominated Geoff, a business analyst who spent most of December learning about Agile himself as our ‘champion’. He has also been able to get some consultancy time from Andy, who works for an external company who specialises in doing this sort of thing. Together they guided us through the initial couple of workshops.

It is vitally important that as many relevant people as possible attend these workshops to maximise universal understanding of the requirements and the drivers for the project. Because the project has not yet been formally approved, we were limited by the absence of a technical team – the developers who would undertake the work. They were, however, represented by the technical architect who knew more about the system and its functionality than any other individual. We also had no DBA or hardware specialist present. Hopefully their absence will not be significant at this stage.

Geoff had transcribed the initial high-level bullet-point requirements that the product owners wrote up, onto a pile of 4” X 5” cards known as story cards. These were then ranked into High, Medium and Low according to the perceived priority. We did this purely as a way of getting into the mindset of ‘chunking’ things up, a top-down approach, and relative prioritisation.

Story Points

For each (H,M,L) pile of cards, we then estimated their size and complexity in story points. There are a few possible scales to use for this but we settled on the most common one – 0,1,2,3,5,8,13,20. It is important that all aspects of the story are recognised, especially the degree of uncertainty. If the requirement is unclear (and it frequently will be at this stage), factor in the need for additional research, analysis, usability studies, etc, as well as the usual development and testing effort.

The thing to remember about story points is that they are relative only to other stories within the project. They are not comparable across projects.

Benefit

Once the story points had been allocated, we went through the cards again to assess the relative benefit of each feature. This is where the use of cards proved invaluable. The product owner and his team simply sorted the cards in descending order of which would provide the most benefit. We then annotated the cards with BB:1 for the card that provided the greatest benefit, then BB:2 and so on.

MoSCoW

Given the size and relative benefit of each story, the product owner then felt comfortable assigning priorities to them according to the MoSCoW scale of Must have, Should have, Could have or Won’t have.

This already looked like a fairly sizeable project, and getting to this point took up two half-day sessions, but it was well worth it.

My next post will describe the next stage of the process – determining duration.

Small company benefits

Even after just over a month here, the differences between working for a small company and a big one are profound. There is no security in reception for example; in fact there is no reception desk. I have not had to wear a ‘visitor’ badge for the first week until having my photo taken and a proper keycard made up. Instead I got keys to the front door and the alarm code on day 1.

I do not get bombarded with emails about how department X has developed a new process for handling work requests. Getting some software added to my PC does not involve a paragraph of justification, two layers of authorisation and three weeks lead time. Instead I asked the ‘IT Services’ guy – one of only two – to install Firefox. Two hours later, job done!

Resignation

In November '07, I was in a difficult position :

• My authority as a project manager had been usurped by a contract programme manager who was effectively doing my job as well as his own.
• I had little or no control over the (remote) suppliers I relied on, and was therefore ineffective.
• I had no further work scheduled
• A(nother) restructure had split the responsibilities of line management and project management in such a way that project managers like me had no control over the people who were assigned to their project. This, in my view, contravenes the number one rule of management - it's all about the people!
  

My position was untenable and I did the only thing I could. I resigned.

Of course, I got another job first. I had kept in touch with R, who had worked on Condor with me. He had moved to another company and by all accounts was loving it. So, when I felt I needed a change, I contacted him again and asked if his company had a vacancy. They did!

Before I go into details of my new job, though, I would like to comment on leaving the old one.

My terms of employment specified that either side needed to give 12 weeks notice. At the time I signed it in November '05, I wasn't planning to leave any time soon, and it was not something I thought I could argue about at the time. So I signed.

Now, two years later, I couldn't wait to leave, and had no inclination to wait around for 3 months doing nothing before I could start my new job. But having done a little research at my favourite resource on the subject of management, I went and spoke to my bosses boss, Gavin. It was he who had initially interviewed me, and if anybody had the final say on my leaving it would be him. Once I got confirmation from my new boss that I had got the job, I made an appointment to see Gavin one-to-one.
"I'm resigning!" I said as an opener. Beating around the bush is not his style, nor mine. He paused for a second, expressionless, then asked:
"What are the drivers?"
I explained that I had no control over what I was doing, that someone else was doing my job and that I could only get the opportunities I wanted elsewhere. He challenged me on that, but I wasn't there for an argument. I refused to say where I was going, and said I was here to "negotiate my exit date".

I argued that:

1. My project was due to go live within a week
2. I had no other work allocated to me, so would not have to hand anything over
   

And then I asked to leave in three weeks.

To my amazement, he agreed. With some proviso's. All he insisted on was that the project was implemented successfully as scheduled, and that warranty support was in place and working. Which was achieved.

I didn't quite manage to follow Mark's advice to "tell no-one", but I did make appointments with some people I wanted to stay in touch with and told them face-to-face. And I still have them as valuable contacts.

So, if you are in the same position as me, here's my advice -

1. Listen to the M-T series of podcasts on the subject
2. Find another job
3. Once you get it, resign face-to-face with your boss and negotiate the date you leave
4. Ensure that you tie up all loose ends - don't burn bridges
5. Be professional.
   

Good Luck.

In my next post, more about my new job.

Lessons learned

I learned a couple of valuable lessons from project Condor and my time at my last company:

It's not enough to sit back and do just enough to get by. You need to exercise your authority, take charge of the situation and generate confidence in other people's minds (your team's, your peer's and your bosses') that you are fully in control.
I need to have a team around me to be fully effective. My last project involved a third-party supplier up North, a business team in the West Country, and an Infrastructure team in London and Edinburgh (more about this another time, perhaps). I never felt fully in control of the project in that there was nothing I could do when things went wrong.

From now, though, things will be different. Very different!

Resigned

It has been a long time since my last post. I have little in the way of excuses, but here goes anyway -

After my last post, my responsibilities on project Condor, as I called it, were halved when another PM was assigned to help. I didn't take that very well. On top of the fact that I was going through some personal issues at the time, it made me feel very low indeed. The other PM took on more and more of the management responsibilities, and I let him. My motivation was at an all-time low. The project went live in September and I was not invited to the launch party.

Back in late June, though, I was asked to pick up another project because the incumbent had resigned. Initially, I was sceptical. They're giving me some unimportant little project that no-one else wants to get me something to do, I thought. But I was wrong. It was a large project, and a fairly important one. But if anyone else had refused it, they had more sense than me. I took it on, and steered it (sort of) into Production. Once again, though, it was believed I needed 'help' so a dedicated programme manager was assigned to 'help'. Of course, with nothing else to do, he took over and I had little to do.

So I waited until the project was nearly live, and then I resigned. That was in November.

In my next post, I will talk about resignations, in the follow-up I will talk about my new job, which is soooo much better!