Chapter 1: Introduction

We often hear people say “We’re agile, we don’t need a plan” or even worse “We can’t plan”. This is just not true. Release Planning in agile is as important as it is in traditional projects, the only difference is there are a few techniques that help make sure the plans bear some relation to reality. We’ve all worked on projects where you know from day one that you will be late, and yet no one does anything about it. Agile planning is different. We give up the illusion of control of traditional rigid plans, and replace it with a clear view of where we actually are, even if it’s badly behind schedule, so that we can make decisions based on what is actually possible.

We have run Release Planning workshops with many organisations. Sometimes starting with C-level executives to set the direction and vision for a product suite; other times starting with teams and making sense of what they are currently working on. This book is a collection of our workshops that will help you run similar workshops to create agile Release Plans. We include teaching points on a range of techniques like Story Mapping and Release Burnups to help you explain to other’s how to use these methods effectively.

The chapters in this book each relate to a different topic on Release Planning. You can use the book in a number of ways.

• You could use all the chapters together to deliver a half or full day workshop on Release Planning. This is usually how we run the workshops, as a result many chapters build on things done in the previous chapter.
• You can use an individual chapter to run a workshop session on a particular topic of interest.

In all cases we highly recommend using actual roadmaps or lists of work for people to practise the techniques. Occasionally we give an example to illustrate a technique. If you do that, ask people to practise the technique they have just learned on their roadmap.

Unlike our previous book on Training Scrum, we don’t assume you are an expert on the topics in this book. Not every coach and trainer have come across the same tools. If a topic is new to you, we have provided details of the points we teach for each topic in the C2 section. There are also links to blog posts and books we recommend on the topic on our website.

You only need the standard training kit mentioned in How to use this Series to run all the workshops in this book.