Development Team
Planning Cards Help Agile Teams Estimate Work
11 January 2018
Agile Workflows
š„ Update: The limited-edition product sold out!
Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™ has Planning Cards as a tool to help agile teams estimate work. Excerpts of the information and instructions—which are included with each deck of the cards—follow. This article is for those interested in getting an overview.
About These Planning Cards
- These cards are used to help estimate work
- Each deck contains four sets of cards—enough for four estimators
- Each of the four sets has a unique color on the front side of cards—it’s in either blue, green, orange, or yellow
- Cards are based on the Fibonacci sequence, where every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding numbers
- Each set includes cards with the following values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and "?"
- Each deck comes in a storage case
Purpose
These cards and instructions support the most popular approach to estimating work in Scrum projects—estimating the complexity of work via story points.
The Development Team—which may be comprised of business analysts, coders, testers, etc.—collaboratively estimates each item in the product backlog in story points. Story points are a relative measure of complexity.
Participants
- Product Owner
- Development Team
- Scrum Master (facilitator/observer)
Frequency
- Once or twice per sprint
Time-box
- One hour for each week of the sprint
- It’s a common practice to limit each meeting to one hour and have multiple meetings as appropriate
Prerequisites/Inputs
- Product backlog containing user stories, bugs, and other requirements
- One set of planning cards for each member of the Development Team
Suggested Steps
1. If each member of the Development Team does not already have their own set of planning cards, the Scrum Master provides materials as needed
2. The Product Owner describes an item (a user story, bug, or other requirement) from the product backlog and mentions its intent and business value
3. Each member of the Development Team silently picks a card best representing their assessment of the complexity of the work and places the card face-down
4. After all of the Development Team members have made their selections, the cards are turned face-up, and the values are read aloud
5. If all of the selections have the same value, the Product Owner records it as the estimate, and that completes the exercise for the item; otherwise, proceed to the next step
6. Team member(s) who gave an outlier value —such as someone who gave a high value and/or someone who gave a low value—explain their reasoning
7. After a brief discussion, the team may take the most common value (the mode average) as the estimate or they may play another round of this planning game (steps 3-7)
8. Steps 2-7 are repeated until each item in the product backlog has been estimated
9. The Product Owner updates the product backlog with the estimate values
Options
Some organizations use a subset of the cards and slice product backlog items when the estimate is "too large." Here's an example:
- Development Team uses cards with the following values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and 21
- Predetermined that 21 is "too large"
- If a product backlog item is estimated at 21, it is sliced into two or more parts in collaboration with the Product Owner, and the resulting smaller items are estimated by the Development Team
This article provided a quick overview of an aspect of estimation in agile projects. Further details—including more information on the Fibonacci sequence, and additional options—are provided in the book, Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions. Agile Scrum is available in paperback and ebook formats at Amazon. For additional information, visit AgileScrumGuide.com.
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© Copyright 2018 Scott M. Graffius, AgileScrumGuide.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the express written permission of Scott M. Graffius/AgileScrumGuide.com.
Scott M. Graffius Named Author of the Week by AUTHORSWEEK for His New Title, Agile Transformation
08 May 2019
Agile Workflows
AUTHORSWEEK named Scott M. Graffius as Author of the Week for his new title, Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change. This is Scott's second book. His first title, Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions, garnered 17 first place awards.
About the Author
Scott M. Graffius is a project management expert, consultant, speaker, and author. He is CEO of Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™, a professional services firm, where he partners with client companies to help them achieve their strategic objectives and business initiatives through project management leadership. Before that, he ran and supervised the delivery of projects in public and private companies with businesses ranging from e-commerce to advanced technology, manufacturing, entertainment, and more. Scott's first book, Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions (ISBN-13: 9781533370242), garnered 17 first place awards from national and international competitions. Scott and Agile Scrum have been featured in Yahoo Finance, the Boston Herald, Learning Solutions, Informa, Innovation Management, and additional media publications. He regularly speaks at conferences and other events around the world. For additional information on Scott, see his bio.
About the Book
š Award-winning, quick-read #agile #projectmanagement š #book ‘Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change’ is available š worldwide: https://t.co/GDuxvhDgyO. pic.twitter.com/KgwoC9P0bX
— Agile Transformation Book (@AgileTransform) February 2, 2022
Thriving in today's marketplace frequently depends on making a transformation to become more agile. Those successful in the transition enjoy faster delivery speed and ROI, higher satisfaction, continuous improvement, and additional benefits. Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change (ISBN-13: 978-1072447962) provides a revealing behind-the-scenes story about an actual successful agile implementation at a global entertainment company.
The award-winning book — a quick (60-90 minute) read — is available in paperback and ebook/Kindle formats in the United States and around the world. Some links by country follow.
- š¦šŗ Australia
- š¦š¹ Austria
- š§š· Brazil
- šØš¦ Canada
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- š©š° Denmark
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- š More countries
About AUTHORSWEEK
AUTHORSWEEK provides a weekly round-up of the latest book releases and author platform programs. For additional information, visit their website at AUTHORSWEEK.COM.
Let's Connect
Connect with AgileScrumGuide.com on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
And connect with agile project management practitioner, consultant, award-winning author, and international speaker Scott M. Graffius on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
© Copyright 2019 Scott M. Graffius, AgileScrumGuide.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the express written permission of Scott M. Graffius/AgileScrumGuide.com.