Saving you from Quarterly Planning - Part 3
What’s wrong with big batch planning, and how to undo it.
Now you have some concrete steps you can take to remove big batch quarterly planning that I shared in Part 2. It's time to explore some naturally occurring pitfalls you can avoid to make removing it more effective and less risky. Learn from my experience and ensure your success by navigating through these with me.
Avoid these pitfalls
Availability for the Meeting
This is counter-intuitive, but people seem to make space for long, 2 day meetings, but not for shorter ones.
One of the major challenges wasn’t people trying to stop us from altering the planning approach but the issue of trying to book the more regular meeting, trying to find a regular monthly slot was almost impossible, even when people were given two or three months' notice to start attending.
This meant that there were senior people who didn’t attend and this caused problems, they would send proxies in their place and then the proxy would have to go back and spend a lot of time with them to bring them up to speed on what was in the planning and then that would sometimes end in them coming back and changing priorities or demands.
Eventually, by consistently referencing the central artefact and always keeping the conversations about planning about and around the monthly event we achieved the result. You will have to be resilient about it.
Dropping other Useful Events
Often there are regular delivery events such as a weekly or fortnightly scrum of scrums, it’s important not to drop those events that are focused much more at looking at ‘NOW’ rather than looking forward.
Minimising the Importance of Collaboration on Dependencies
Another style of regular catch up that can’t be dropped is collaborating on how to coordinate or resolve dependencies. Teams that are affected should be catching up all the time and be working shoulder to shoulder with the other team on these things, and not waiting for a regular planning event.
Unfortunately when all teams suffer from being busy, for example they have too much work in progress and are being pressured to meet deadlines, or they are just very focussed on their own goals, this kind of collaboration can be dropped. Because dependencies are quite unique to the organisation, their context, and the architecture of their platforms, it’s not necessarily a regular session so any effort you can make to highlight dependencies and support the teams to discuss regularly is time well spent.
Taking Planning Accountability away from Teams
This is closely related to a benefit of more regular planning however I have found that the opportunity that’s created by removing quarterly planning and shortening the planning cycle is that teams are forced to actually look at their plans at least once a month, rather than once a quarter.
The upside of this is they have the opportunity to to adapt, inspect for risks, issues and potential problems that come up, because of that it’s important not to take the benefit of this away from the team and give it to a third party, e.g. a program manager or ‘release train engineer’. It’s very valuable for the teams to get better at the practice of planning and not for us to consider it to be a different skill set for a different role type. At the end of the day, the team themselves needs to own their work, and their commitments.
Optimism Bias
Ever heard the phrase related to estimation “double it and add 20%”? Like all good hardworking people we can suffer from being overly optimistic about how long things take, and this leads to disappointment when features are promised and not delivered.
It’s important to create an environment where it’s okay to discuss and debate how things will go, where more people feel more empowered to enter that discussion and are not tempted to satisfy a manager with an overly positive response. Make it ok for everyone to ask questions about what people have considered in their planning and to get input from everyone with the goal of improving plans. After all, it’s likely your peers and other teams have better local knowledge with which to ask questions than a manager who may be more distanced from the detail.
In fact, after writing this, I think it’s better to say that it’s not just enough to create a safe environment for this, you have to actively prompt the questions, and bring optimism into the light.
Too much WIP (and Overburden)
Not limiting Work in Progress (WIP) can lead to several pitfalls in any work environment and multiple teams planning together is no different.
It’s important to focus on priorities, an excessive amount of WIP causes confusion and inefficiency, it splits a teams focus and teams can be easily distracted from their goals if too much is asked of them at once.
My approach was to identify the top priorities and the necessary teams accordingly, normally leaving little room for lower-priority work. This approach highlights the need to avoid spreading teams too thin across numerous tasks and instead concentrate on what truly matters. This process of trimming down the workload sheds light on the question of how then shall we tackle the remaining goals, emphasising the implications of having an excessive workload, that is, it will slow EVERYTHING down, including the highest priority work.
You can make this even more efficient by asking only what are the highest priorities, and not comb through extensive lists to allocate everything a priority. Once the highest priorities are planned and delivered efficiently, we can get to lower priority concerns.
The Disappearing Team Phenomenon
This may have been exacerbated by the enforced remote working of the Covid years, but a significant issue emerges when a team fails to actively participate in the planning process.
In my case the team, facing remote work challenges and limited planning tools, used the central spreadsheet to coordinate the efforts of over 20+ teams. An issue was the reluctance of some team members to update the spreadsheet and provide essential details, which stems from a cultural problem. This lack of engagement hindered effective planning, and the remote setting made it easier for individuals to avoid participation altogether.
Ultimately if people are not enjoying the planning process or at least getting some value out of it, they will avoid getting involved. This underlines the importance of fostering a culture of active involvement and accountability in planning, whether in remote or in-person work settings, to ensure the participation of all involved teams. The more the team feels accountable for their own plans the more they will arrive prepared and happy to talk about upcoming work.
In the ongoing exploration of this topic, the next instalment, "Saving you from Quarterly Planning - Part 4," delves into the myriad of benefits, which are overwhelmingly positive and will help to convince you to give it a try if you aren’t already sold.
Keep an eye out and get ready to make the decision to save yourself from big batch Quarterly planning meetings!