SPEAKER

Finding the right practice for the various levels of planning

The planning onion highlights the different levels of planning necessary in agile organizations: daily, iteration, release, product, portfolio and strategy level planning. With new tools and techniques such as Impact Mapping and not-so-new ones like Big Wall or Story Mapping, catering for all the upper levels is becoming more and more easy.

The talk provides a high level overview of the tools we used at several organizations to solve these planning questions, their right places in the onion and also potential overlaps – how can these practices support each other. It also focuses on when using these techniques becomes very important and when can they be omitted; as sometimes not all of the specified levels have to be supported.

The tools placed on the onion will be:
– Mitch Lacey’s Big Wall to support up-front initial estimation
– Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping to give structure to backlogs and provide fullness
– Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping to ensure development is delivering based on business goals
– Dean Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Framework for scaling for larger organizations
– Eric Ries’ MVP concept for reducing time-to-market