Release Planning

When developing a project for Agile as with most things, it is important that you have a plan for the project as well as when you plan to release it. This is extra important if your team is spread out geographically. With proper planning and communication, your team can deal with several possible problems such as: not wasting time looking for information, there are less meetings, preferably no meetings beyond the daily scrum meeting, and your team won’t forget any small details that might be easily missed.

The first step in planning out your project is to collect all the ideas, or the why of the project. This is important as having all the ideas or fragmented plans for the project all in one place, it is easier to determine what the problem is that needs to be solved and how to solve it. The project manager should add their own notes on the various ideas and pick which ones would fit with the problem they are trying to solve.

Once all the different ideas and plans are all organized into one set plan the next step is to determine what you will need to do to get the project or feature out to the customer and when you plan to release it. (Wetenhall) At this stage the deliverables that are most important are, who is going to design or build it? What your goals are? How will you achieve those goals? Include all this in the release planning page so that you and your team will always have a constant reminder of what you plan to do. Below is an example page of what this might look like.

Once the background, proposal, teams and their goals are set up, it is now time to sketch out a roadmap for the project. This is useful in several ways such as: You get an instant sanity check. Visualizing the streams of work in a proposed timeline will help you see whether accomplishing your goals in that time frame is realistic. (Wetenhall) The priorities of the team are clear and makes it easy to break down the larger project into manageable pieces. And the communication is cleared up so stakeholders know what is going on.

As soon as you have agreement in what you plan to do, you can now put the plan into action. The first thing you will want to do is to write out the requirements for you team to work with. This will make it clear and easy to see what must be done and so it is easy to see what details are important for the project. Feedback is very important at this stage as will help bring up any issues such as clarification or possible improvements. The requirements can be linked to the issues and can be quickly dealt with.

Sources:

Wetenhall, John. “A product manager's guide to release planning.” Atlassian Blog, Atlassian, 6 July 2017, www.atlassian.com/blog/agile/product-managers-guide-release-planning.