Shape Up, Planning the execution - What for?
It is one of the articles in the Shape Up series.
For Table of Contents go to: How to make Shape Up successful?
Why bother?
The advantage of a well-executed Kickoff is that it provides valuable insights into the project. Still, for more complex projects, a planning session may be necessary. This can be scheduled a few hours after kickoff or 1-3 days later to give team members enough space to structurize their thinking and do initial research before the planning begins.
Shape Up's default approach to project execution aims to empower the Building Team by entrusting them with the responsibility of delivering the project on their terms. This concept resonates with me, and I endorse it, given my belief that the world would benefit from having fewer managers.
However, specific prerequisites must be met to attain this level of autonomy.
Lack of planning skills
A challenge arises with the assumption that the Building Team has project planning skills. In reality, many product teams lack such expertise, especially if they have transitioned from Sprint-based workflows focused on individual stories and tasks.
Despite the relief of not having to manage Jira issues, many teams end up proceeding chaotically, lacking collaboration and communication, which impacts the project's progress. And it makes Shape Up’s implementation unsuccessful.
The article is divided into two parts, with this section focusing on the reasoning behind the importance of planning. The next part will describe a few planning techniques that you can apply.
Two types of people
An essential aspect of project planning is understanding that not everyone will be happy about it. We may divide all the people into two groups.
The first group of people can think strategically. By that, I mean they see the world as a series of events over time. They automatically see dependencies between them. Many people see multiple paths going from one point to another.
The second group of people are focused on the here and now. They want to focus on getting into the flow without thinking about what's next. They might be irritated by discussing longer-term plans than just one day ahead. They want to focus on just doing.
I will elaborate more on it in the article about respecting people's strengths. For now, let's understand that it will not be easy and sometimes impossible to migrate members of the second group into the first group. Sometimes individual coaching will help them gain the ability to see long-term. However, many people will want to stay in this second group. And that's ok.
From my perspective, projects are often delivered on time with proper scope hammering and re-planning to deliver it in a given appetite when at least part of the team has strategic thinking abilities. When everyone prefers to stay just-in-time, delivering before the cooldown is hard. When a team lacks such perspective, an engineering manager's job is to support them with proper coaching or work with the team actively to fill the skills gap.
What are the reasons to do the planning?
Let’s summarise that in the following way:
Helps to stay on track.
Helps to collaborate.
Helps to discover unknown unknowns and risks.
Helps to deliver on time and have a cooldown.
Helps to make managers and stakeholders shut up.
Let's go through each of these.
Helps to stay on track
The output of planning is a project plan. Many people say: plans are useless, but planning Is essential. From my perspective, Shape Up projects are short… because of that, plans can always be made and valuable.
Discussions during that planning lead to a better understanding of what's realistic to be achieved in a given appetite. Creating a plan with a specific deadline enables us to put a few orientation points on a timeline. Then, these points serve us as lighthouses to release.
Going through the project, we look at these lighthouses. It is not mandatory to do everything as planned initially, but to understand if we're going in the right direction. If we turn wrong, we look at the lighthouses again and adjust our course.
Throughout the whole Building Phase, we keep revisiting the plan.
Helps to collaborate
Thanks to the plan, we stay aligned with our colleagues and have more effective discussions. We can ensure that we build more space for deep work and understand in which moments we may need collaborative brainstorming or synchronisation points to integrate some dependencies.
If the team has a plan, it is much easier to agree on "let's adjust the plan and agree on what's next" in 5 minutes instead of spending an entire hour starting this discussion from scratch over and over again.
A common pitfall of new Shape Up teams is that they drop dailies and issue tracking. As a result, they stop collaborating. While scheduled long meetings are often a waste of time… the short huddles and issue tracking are helpful when done intelligently.
Planning brings more transparency, which enables us to support our colleagues or ask them for help.
Helps to discover unknown unknowns and risks
Understanding the journey towards the goal helps us to see where we have gaps in our knowledge. Moments in which we're not sure what we should do. The plan enables us to put red spots in some specific project areas.
We spot these moments early by investing our time in planning at the beginning of the project. Otherwise, we would discover them a few days before the Building Phase's end, generating unnecessary stress and delays.
Helps to have a cooldown
At the end of a building phase, we can 1) Release, 2) Stop the project, or 3) Continue working during the cooldown.
Spending cooldowns on projects or bugs is not something anyone likes, so let’s assume that 3rd scenario is not an option. Stopping the projects without the release is also not fun - we all want to be successful. Appetite is a tool that should help us get valuable work done in a given timeframe.
To reduce the awkwardness of engineers asking the manager about having a cooldown while they failed execution of the 5th cycle in a row and released nothing - we need to start delivering on time. As simple as that.
Well-executed planning will ensure we aim to have the critical scope done and risks addressed as soon as possible, without bike-shedding. Seeing the big picture allows us to leave enough space for testing, applying improvements and release. Proper planning techniques will help us build projects incrementally or iteratively, with early testing, instead of aiming for a big-bang release.
If we cannot get something on time, planning helps us see it weeks before the cycle ends. Being aware of upcoming problems enables us to react to them during the building phase, so before (not after) the cooldown starts.
Helps to make managers and stakeholders shut up
While it is often a good practice to limit the number of commitments in public, there's always some group of internal stakeholders. Depending on the level of publicity of information about upcoming deliveries, some people will be interested in what we are building. Some of them may even help us in building better solutions.
We all get pissed off when someone asks us too often about the status or release date. That’s true - these questions are rarely valuable, but we, as Builders, are usually the root cause because we work in a poor way that forces someone to ask this question.
From my experience, it is often enough to make our plan transparent. Making other people understand we know what we are doing is more important than giving them a concrete date. Sharing our delivery plan with explicit risks makes others believe we are professionals.
Planning is infinite
Planning is not a one-off activity. Initial planning at the beginning of the cycle creates an initial plan. Then, we use it as a tool that we constantly revisit to make our execution successful. So-called R&D projects focused on research, and spiking might also be planned - just on a higher level. It leads to collaboration, transparency, higher quality, and success.
In the next article, we will look at a few techniques that may help us build a plan.