The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Yes, Agile Teams Can Create Accurate Plans - Mike Cohn

Mar 13, 2024

The podcast discusses the evolution of release plans in Agile teams, emphasizing the importance of accurately predicting future deliveries. It explores how plans can be accurate without being overly precise and the balance between accuracy and precision in long-term planning.

06:24

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Mike Cohn

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Quick takeaways

Accurate long-range plans in agile teams require sacrificing precision for increased accuracy in forecasting deliveries over several months.

Teams should provide estimates within a range to manage expectations and build trust with stakeholders in long-term planning.

Deep dives

Importance of Accurate Long-Term Planning

Teams in agile environments can create accurate plans with varying release frequencies, ranging from every sprint to continuous releases. While the term 'release plan' may seem outdated, it remains crucial for predicting deliveries over several sprints or months. The podcast emphasizes that accurate long-range plans often lack the precision seen in short-term plans, highlighting the difference between accuracy and precision in forecasting. To build trust and ensure success, it recommends communicating plans with a range of estimates to manage expectations.

Exploring Teams' Ability to Create Accurate Plans in Agile Methodologies

4min

Balancing Accuracy and Precision in Long-Term Planning

2min

Yes, Agile Teams Can Create Accurate Plans - Mike Cohn

The term release plan made a lot more sense when Scrum first began in the 1990s. At that time, most teams would run a series of sprints and then release a product.
Today, most teams release more often than every few sprints. Some release every sprint and others release multiple times per sprint or even many times per day.
Release plan might be an outdated term, but it’s still essential for many teams to be able to accurately predict what will be delivered three, six, or perhaps more months into the future.
So whether you call it quarterly planning, release planning, PI planning, or milestone planning, you’ll be much more successful if you, and your leadership team, understand that accurate long-range plans typically lack the level of precision possible in short-term plans.

Plans Can Be Accurate without Being Precise

To put that another way: to ensure accuracy, the longer the planning period the less precise your prediction will be.
If I ask your team in January when you can finish a project, you could likely tell me, “by the end of Q3.” By June, you might be able to update your estimate to “sometime in October.” By early September, you will likely feel confident enough to tell me “the week of October 22” or perhaps, “We’ll definitely have the first ten backlog items done by October 18, but I’m not sure about the next five yet.”
All of those answers are equally accurate. But the level of precision varies depending on how far out in time I’m asking you to estimate.
So when you are communicating your quarterly plans, I recommend communicating your plans as a range, either of time or of scope (or potentially both). By the end of the quarter we’ll give you between 180 and 220 story points. To deliver the 300 points you’ve asked for will take between six and eight sprints.
Being accurate by giving up some precision will increase the trust other people have in your team and will help you succeed with agile.

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