Book Chapter Summary | Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (New York, 2014) by Jeff Sutherland - Chapter Six: Plan reality, not fantasy

Chapter Six: Plan reality, not fantasy

Plans almost always describe a fictional reality, so only plan for the next increment of value and estimate the remainder of the project in larger chunks

Quick Summary

• Estimates of work at the beginning of a project range from 400 percent of the time taken to 25 percent of the time take (as plotted on the cone of uncertainty)
• Humans are terrible at estimating, but good at comparing the size of one task to another
• Use planning poker to estimate tasks, and at the end of a sprint you'll know your sprint velocity (the pace at which your team gets through work)

Main Points

Projects tend to accumulate documentation as people cut and paste and throw in boilerplate. This leads to thousands of pages outlining requirements, compliance, reports, phase gates and quality assurance. Buried among it all somewhere is what actually needs to be done. Capture these on sticky notes, and estimate how long each will take. Then prioritize the work. People will say everything is important. But insist on asking what will bring the most value to the project.

Chapter Overview

Identify how you'll know a task is done, taking into consideration things like quality and compliance considerations. Capture this in a definition of done, and it'll save you costly rework later on. Estimate tasks using the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on), which permits the team to not be accurate. Do this using planning poker, where everyone in a team plays a card with one of these numbers on, and take the average as the estimate. If these estimates are wildly different, discuss and re-vote. Work in user stories, rather than tasks. And have a definition of ready based on the INVEST criteria. The amount of work completed in a sprint give you a sprint velocity, allowing to plan and identify how to speed things up.

Other interesting stuff

Once you have your sprint velocity, you can better find out what's stopping you from going faster. Provide senior management with a list of impediments, and request that they send a memo to all staff with a managers name with responsibility to remove each impediment. To further speed up delivery, ask the following three questions: 1) Is there anything we can do differently to speed things up? 2) Can we offload some Backlog items? Is there stuff we can get other teams to do? 3) Can we not do some things? Can we reduce the scope of the project by any amount? Even when people say the requirements have been cut to the bone, spend an afternoon whittling away at it. Every task has to fight for its life. It can shave further time off a project.