Planning Work

In both Waterfall and iterative processes, teams conduct planning sessions to decide what they will work on next. In this lesson, I will focus on techniques that make planning exercises productive and most effective.

I may use terms from Agile (such as Product Backlog or a Story), but I do not necessarily prescribe following Agile processes over Waterfall.

Prioritized backlog

When a team finishes its assignments, it is time to pick the next task from the product backlog. The simplest way to quickly grab something is to take it from the top of the list. However, when the process is not mature, there may not be a list or it may not be sorted by priority. In such a case, a developer may need to check with a business analyst (or product owner) to locate the most critical task. If the analyst is not available, the engineer will need to either wait or pick a job based on their judgment, which may not be ideal. Waiting means more time before the next feature is released, while guesswork implies that an important task may get delayed. Besides, such situations may hint at other problems, such as unclear product roadmap or poor backlog management.

Therefore, it is the responsibility of a business analyst (or product owner) to maintain backlog items sorted by priority. At any point, the development team should feel comfortable picking the top-most task from the list without the overhead of additional questions, wait times, and delays to features.

This issue usually seems unimportant, but you will improve several strategically essential activities such as roadmap planning and continuous flow of work by solving it. Eventually, you will also save development time and accelerate the delivery pace slightly, as such small improvements accumulate.

Feasibility

Achieving a continuous flow of development work is vital, as it means no delays and unnecessary interruptions. When the backlog is prioritized, that is a good start because now the team can keep coming back to it to pick the next task when there is free capacity. What happens next is also paramount. We need to ensure that work gets carried out successfully and without blockages. If there are minor questions in the middle of development, that is not a big problem. On the other hand, it is a ...