Recently I was following some twitter feed about #NoEstimates. I’m no expert, but it seems to be a conversation about the fundamental value, or lack of value, that planning provides to teams. What they seem to be arguing is that planning represents a lot of wasted effort that would be better spent elsewhere. Fundamentally I would have to agree. I’ve wasted a tremendous amount of time arguing about story points, burning down hours, and calculating person days – all for what se

“Even imperfect answers can improve decision making.” – Donald Reinertson When I read this from Reinertson’s book on flow, I realized that I had found the reason that people have so much trouble with story points. It’s a matter of overcoming their fear of inaccuracy. They are under the misguided belief in the accuracy of using hours or days to estimate work on projects. They’re basically afraid of being wrong (aren’t we all?) and that is the source of a lot of resistance to c

So the other day a VP asked our team for an estimate on a project. Now, putting aside whatever feelings you may have about the usefulness of estimates, we did a little planning, a little investigating, a little debating, and came up with an estimate for the project. I brought the estimate back to the VP and then the fireworks began. Apparently he had been thinking of a different number than we had given him. He wanted it done in half the time that we had forecast. Whoops. Now

So there you are, wrapping up another successful release planning session. Sprints are all laid out for the entire release. All the user stories you can think of have been defined. All the daunting challenges laid down. Compromises have been made. Dates committed to. Everyone contributed to the planning effort fully. So why isn’t everyone happy? Let’s check in with the product owner: The product owner looks like somebody ran over his puppy. The team? They won’t make eye conta

Often when people talk about public speaking, they are typically referring to an individual speaker. You don’t see much advice for people who present in pairs. When it works out, it is a beautiful thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When it fails, usually one speaker or the other takes the brunt of the damage. Here are some things that I recommend doing to insure a paired speaking engagement is successful: Keep it simple and let each speaker own a port

Over the holidays I’ve been reading “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. It’s a wonderful read, but dense – it’s definitely “armchair and a pipe” material – you can’t rush it.  I came across this interesting quote regarding the nature of human thought: But human thought – and its close relatives, problem solving and planning – seem more rooted in past experience than in logical deduction. Mental life is not neat and orderly. It does not proceed smoothly and grace

I was facilitating a planning meeting with the team a week ago and it was not going well. We had our stories all ready to go before the meeting. The stories were well formed. All we had to do was come up with a list of tasks for each story. How long could that take? An hour? An hour later we finished the first of nine stories. It had taken us an entire hour to identify 3 tasks! It was like pulling teeth. I’d ask the team to provide a list of tasks…silence. I’d take different

It took me a while, but I think I’ve finally grokked the difference between type 1, type 2, and type 3 scrum. These different types or gradations of Scrum were suggested by Jeff Sutherland, one of the originators of Scrum. Briefly, the three types can be rather simply described as follows: Type 1 – Fixed gates: Standard, out of the book Scrum. Plan your sprint, run your sprint, review your sprint – rinse and repeat. Type 2 – Overlapping gates: Plan your sprint, run your sprin

A few notes on this list: I tried to collect just the tools that are written specifically for the purpose of Agile planning. I know that a lot of teams use 3×5 cards and/or Excel for tracking and managing their projects. However, although you can use Excel to manage your planning process, Excel was not created with Agile planning in mind. So Excel doesn’t belong on this list. There are plenty of planning products that make the claim of being compatible with Agile planning. Fo