Excel remains a popular solution for many teams and managers to calculate the delivery output for a given time span. There are two approaches that are extremely popular for planning:
- Manual Planning: A person, usually a project manager, prompts the development teams to provide an approximate number of days for executing a ticket. Afterward, he visually identifies the point on a timeline when the work can be completed and enters the start and end dates that are calculated based on the available slot and ticket duration into a spreadsheet.
- Velocity-based Planning: This approach is usually executed by a development team and a product owner. The team first calculates the velocity of a sprint, or program increment, in a spreadsheet, a number that constitutes the total capacity of all members of the team. Meanwhile, technical leads assign a high-level estimate for priority tickets in the backlog. Once both actions are complete, the product owner selects tickets for a sprint by maximizing the output based on the high-level estimate of the tickets and the sprint velocity of the team.
What’s wrong with spreadsheet planning?
Both approaches imply a focus on the team capacity usage optimization. While it seems simple and intuitive to do so, the more important indicator is the business value output. For that indicator, there are many more factors that can affect it:
- Multi-tasking: Multiple studies state that multi-tasking slows down team performance and decreases productivity by double digits.
- High Uncertainty: Increased uncertainty in requirements often leads to unaccounted risk and late deliveries.
- Hidden Bottlenecks: Missing even a single dependency can cause major turbulence for the entire plan.
- Tedious planning: It takes a lot of time to calculate and update spreadsheets, especially when the company scales, which often delays important decisions mid-sprint and traps teams with unrealistic dates
The effect of just one or more of these factors can easily lead to missed delivery dates and unmet expectations for stakeholders.
Predictive planning: an alternative, automated solution that is designed for predictable delivery
There is a solution that helps build much more reliable schedules. Predictive planning is based on advanced forecasting focused on delivering the maximum of business value with tight timing, resource constraints, and high uncertainty. It employs the following optimizations to the usual sprint or quarterly planning process:
- Resource leveling based on past performance for maximum teams’ productivity
- Added buffers to address risk and minimize local disruptions caused by uncertainty
- Eliminating bottlenecks by managing dependencies to ensure smooth and continuous execution
- Built-in automation for an efficient change management
To learn more about the predictive planning approach visit the Honest Roadmaps website.