Project estimation is the first step towards making a robust project management plan. Project managers spend a lot of time and effort in carving out estimates and more often than not, these estimates just blow up as they hit the execution floors. So how is planning and estimation different in agile project management?
Before diving into the details let us understand the common estimation approaches that are prevalent across organizations. All project management teams end up with estimations that aren’t in sync with the ground realities of project execution.
All of these and many more such factors play a role in skewing your estimation and execution at the same time.
To a lot of extent, Yes!
And the question becomes, HOW?
Well, if you take a holistic look, you will find that agile projects are “value driven” as opposed to being plan driven!
Usually, in agile projects, the cost and schedule are kind of a given. For e.g. I have 6 months or 1 year to launch this project with $X.
Hence, the estimation isn’t directly in terms of efforts but in terms of value.
The value of each feature that must go into making the product or a specific service for that matter.
There is a healthy mix of strategic and tactical planning in agile project management.
Themes are at a more strategic level that cover the overall objective of the project so to speak. E.g. reduce product launch cost by 15%.
Epics are larger chunks of work that are a level below the theme to enable meeting the theme goal.
Stories are definite action oriented items from the end user’s perspective as how a specific product item, function or feature will be used.
Tasks are very tactical and granular breakdown of your user stories. They are the actionable items to meet the user stories!
So once the breakdown is done, how are they estimated?
PMI.Org has listed many agile estimation techniques. However, we will focus on 2 very simple and common techniques deployed by agile teams.
T-Shirt Sizing – As the name indicates, it is about sizing backlogs with very large items. And the terminology or measures are usually XS, S, M, L, XL & XXL.
The scrum teams get together for an open discussion on the backlog items and they usually consider the time (mostly in days).
Note that the T-Shirt sizing exercise is at a very high level and is non-numerical in nature.
The idea is to get the technical teams’ creative side out, have an open mind and more receptive of other team members’ view and way of looking at the stories at hand.
It works best for tams that are just starting out with agile project management.
Planning Poker – this is a more numerical way of agile estimation. I personally find it quite a pragmatic way of running estimations.
Basically,
The main reason behind the popularity of agile project management methodologies like Scrum, Kanban etc. lie in the ability to simplify and work efficiently with uncertain requirements.
This comes from the approach to make iterations, release incrementally, test the waters quickly and finally – review & validate frequently.
The estimation done by the actual implementer is most important aspect
Agile is all about self-organizing teams and servant leadership i.e. offering teams greater freedom, accountability as well as authority to align & execute towards the project goal.
Value of each outcome – sprint deliverable helps shape the subsequent items from the backlog. Basically, there is increasing alignment between the perceived and delivered value.
Net result, unless the value of the outcome is greater than the effort, items from the backlog aren’t picked up for execution and ideally eliminated.
So, you also remove clutter with every sprint and your product roadmap becomes further robust and degree of uncertainty is reduced as well.
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