Saving you from Quarterly Planning - Part 2
What’s wrong with big batch planning, and how to undo it.
So what can be done to address the issues of Quarterly Planning I laid out in Part 1? How can we allow conversations and ideas around what we might get our valuable teams to spend their time on to form and solidify, including the permutations and risks and challenges that they are going to face? How did I help this become a reality in a very large corporation who were invested in this process?
Fixing it
Replacing the Quarterly Cadence with a Monthly Schedule
It’s quite common now for organisations to spend one or two days in a quarter doing their planning. One of the best ways to start any type of improvement is to reduce the batch size. We swapped this for about two hours once a month, which equated to less accumulated time, but was of more value and quality as 20 teams across a tribe could talk about their upcoming plans in more detail. Additionally the teams had a better understanding of this shorter horizon of work.
This shorter planning session didn’t happen overnight, it took a while to settle into a rhythm where teams worked out just how much detail to go into, what questions to ask and when to call out issues and concerns. After about 4 months, we typically completed this collaborative exercise in less than 2 hours.
The added benefit is that we could now adjust our strategy more rapidly, instead of making changes on the quarterly boundary we were free to adapt to actual progress, and to the cadence of the change in the business needs, which made teams a more competitive asset for the business.
Adaptive Planning with a Rolling View
Instead of wasting time, planning for things that were unknown far into the future, we adopted a more adaptive cadence, allowing us to actually solve the things that we knew would be planning problems now. We could look at current issues or very near term challenges as well as the unknowns coming up which gave us a chance to improve earlier. This set up a continuous rolling view of the work while letting us actually focus on solving the known problems. This is much more empowering for teams who are really invested in problem solving, rather than ignoring those problems that might occur in a far off horizon.
A Single, Higher Quality Planning Artifact
In the previous blog I described the problem with plans being very high level, with nothing in between these high-level quarterly plans and what the teams did. We worked to get a single shared plan which showed a more detailed view of what each of the teams planned to do. Once we had this single artefact that everyone could access we could review it and see what had changed regularly, with a particular focus being on dependencies as this was a common problem for planning across multiple teams.
The Power of the Shared Plan
The single central planning artefact was powerful for several reasons. It was much better for facilitating decisions than the previous conversational exchanges (often isolated between a PMO/ manager and individual teams) that would happen and often result in no decisions being made. The artefact was a place where information could be collected and facilitated higher quality conversations, there was something tangible to show where the issues and pain points needed attention. Even a simple spreadsheet or Miro board with a roadmap that projected into the future can achieve this.
It was also a simple ‘master view’ of what the teams were working on, which was a richer view than the post its and string that are commonly an output of Quarterly planning. It meant that we all got a better feel for what was planned, and how teams were progressing and when they would become free to pull in new work again.
This can also relieve the problem of a single person having to contain and communicate all the planning information which is logically not possible.
Representing the Team, over requiring the Entire Team
For our monthly session we included Tech Lead, Product Manager and Iteration Manager if the team had one. These roles were responsible for providing updates on the team's requirements, challenges, and dependencies. We had the right people to make critical decisions about business needs at this level, reducing the need for the entire team to attend meetings that provided little value to them.
Bringing the Whole Team Together for More Valuable Reasons
I’ve heard many people enthuse about Quarterly Planning because it’s a chance to bring the whole team together, which I also agree is a great thing to do, however you don’t have to spend so much time bringing them together and instead you can devote those big gatherings to events that are more engaging for people.
Getting everyone together in order to reinforce culture, and create team and cross team cohesion, is valuable. You can also use these opportunities to devote to learning and information exchange and of course celebrating what has been achieved.
Probably the most valuable reason is for alignment. It’s a good opportunity to hear from leaders about longer term business strategy and direction. These topics are always needed for business alignment so it pays to gather in large groups for these occasions.
Ditching the Expensive Quarterly Cadence
Applying these simple steps will give you confidence to evolve your own Quarterly Planning event into something much more valuable and less wasteful for your own company.
Success Factors and Pitfalls
In my next instalment, we'll dive deep into the common pitfalls you should be wary of when applying this transformative approach within your organisation. We'll explore some key success factors that helped me eliminate the inefficiencies and costs associated with inaccurate big batch quarterly planning events. Stay tuned and be prepared to take action to optimise your planning processes for the better!