Your Scrum team plans two sprints ahead. Your sponsor wants a plan for the next twelve months. Sound familiar?
This book is about closing that gap. Agile methods have few tools for long-term planning, and classic methods assume you know the full scope up front. The answer is to combine them.
You start with an overview of seven execution models, from build and fix and Kanban to Scrum, SAFe, Waterfall, PRINCE2 and PRINCE2 Agile, and where each one does its planning. You learn how to describe what your project delivers, and how planning works at every level, from sprint planning to PI planning and hybrid stage plans.
Then come the tools. Seven estimation techniques, from expert judgement and three-point estimates to Delphi and planning poker, each with a step-by-step guide, when it works and when it doesn’t.
Finally, seven scenarios from real projects show how to plan a quarter to a year ahead, and commit to a range your sponsor can trust:
- When will my bug be fixed?
- Scrum inside a stage gate
- Three teams, one 18-month plan
- A Scrum team plans a year ahead
- More ideas than budget
- When one line is not enough
- The customer needs a fixed price from an agile team
The result: you can answer the twelve-month question without pretending to know more than you do.
Who this book is for
IT project managers, Product Owners and team leads who run agile or hybrid projects and need to plan further ahead than the next sprint.
Written by a practitioner
Every technique and scenario in this book comes from real projects. I started out strictly agile, then met a brute-force rollout of PRINCE2, and have combined the two ever since.
Published early, on purpose
This book follows Leanpub’s “publish early, publish often” approach. It is released in versions and improved with feedback from readers, just like an agile project.
