Practice: Quarterly Cycle

[Kent Beck]

I apologize for not posting a practice for the past two weeks. Here is the
next practice:

Plan work a quarter at a time. Once a quarter reflect on the team, the
project, its progress, and its alignment with larger goals.
During quarterly planning:
* Identify bottlenecks, especially those controlled outside the team.
* Initiate repairs.
* Plan the theme or themes for the quarter.
* Pick a quarter's worth of stories to address those themes.
* Focus on the big picture, where the project fits within the
organization.

A season is another natural, widely shared timescale to use in
organizating time for a project. Using a quarter as a planning horizon
synchronizes nicely with other business activities that occur quarterly.
Quarters are also a comfortable interval for interaction with external
suppliers and customers.

The separation of "themes" from "stories" is intended to address the
tendency of the team to get focused and excited about the details of what
they are doing without reflecting on how this week's stories fit into the
bigger picture. Themes also fit well into larger-scale planning such as
drawing marketing roadmaps.

Quarters are also a good interval for team reflection, finding
gnawing-but-unconscious bottlenecks. You can also propose and evaluate
long-running experiments quarterly.



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[Keith Nicholas]

Oh! I like themes, we kind of use them now when we plan ahead. Nice to
have a word for it.

Regards,

Keith

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, 20 December 2004 10:31 a.m.
Subject: [xpe2e] Practice: Quarterly Cycle
I apologize for not posting a practice for the past two
Plan work a quarter at a time. Once a quarter reflect on the
team, the project, its progress, and its alignment with larger goals.
* Identify bottlenecks, especially those controlled outside
the team.
* Initiate repairs.
* Plan the theme or themes for the quarter.
* Pick a quarter's worth of stories to address those themes.
* Focus on the big picture, where the project fits within
the organization.
A season is another natural, widely shared timescale to use
in organizating time for a project. Using a quarter as a
planning horizon synchronizes nicely with other business
activities that occur quarterly.
Quarters are also a comfortable interval for interaction with
external suppliers and customers.
The separation of "themes" from "stories" is intended to
address the tendency of the team to get focused and excited
about the details of what they are doing without reflecting
on how this week's stories fit into the bigger picture.
Themes also fit well into larger-scale planning such as
drawing marketing roadmaps.
Quarters are also a good interval for team reflection,
finding gnawing-but-unconscious bottlenecks. You can also
propose and evaluate long-running experiments quarterly.
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[Appleton Brad-BRADAPP1]

Post by Kent Beck
The separation of "themes" from "stories" is intended to
address the tendency of the team to get focused and excited
about the details of what they are doing without reflecting
on how this week's stories fit into the bigger picture.
Themes also fit well into larger-scale planning such as
drawing marketing roadmaps.

Along those same lines ... I find that when my users (goal donors) and customers (gold owners) are different groups of people, the use of themes helps those stay in alignment as well. My users tend to be more interested in nitty-gritty details of the product and of each story. Whereas my "customers" want less detail (and yet more visibility/transparency).

Getting both customers and end-users to agree on priorities can be difficult when the former is concerned only with coarse-grained higher-level things and the latter is more concerned with each story and its details. (not to mention that in such cases, "customers" may be less inclined to interact daily, perhaps preferring weekly or even once or twice a month).

I find that in such situations, getting my "customers" to prioritize the "themes" while having my "users" prioritize the stories within each theme helps ensure Im meeting the needs of both groups at the right levels of scale.


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