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Working with Planning Series

This guide provides an overview of the Planning Series features, a walk-through of its functionality, and various use cases.

What is Planning Series?

Planning Series was developed to better support teams and organizations that plan and deliver in time-boxed iterations. This could look like following a PI Planning and sprint model, where you plan your work out across multiple Program Increments (PIs) and deliver that work across the sprints within those PIs. Planning Series will better support teams and organizations leveraging Scrum methodologies but can accommodate a wide-range of non-Scrum use cases. 

Planning Series Workflow

  1. When Planning Series is enabled, Administrators will see the Planning Series icon Gantt Icon from Product.png on the AgilePlace Home Screen toolbar. 
  2. Clicking this icon takes you to the Planning Series Administration home screen. You'll see a list of all the Planning Series that have been created for your organization as well as the ability to create a new one.
  3. You can define top-level increments and sub-level increments for a Planning Series. These top-level and sub-level increments could represent different planning and delivery iterations. For example, your top-level increments could represent your Program Increments (PIs) and your sub-level increments could represent your Sprints. 

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Figure 1 - Accessing the Planning Series feature

           

Creating a Planning Series

You can create a Planning Series (Figure 2), by clicking the Create icon Create New Planning Series.pngon the Planning Series Administration home screen.

This allows you to:

  1. Name the Planning Series (on the right side of the screen) to differentiate between various teams in your organization.
  2. Select boards that can use this series (either All Boards or Specific Boards) via two radio buttons. Providing all boards access to this planning series means all boards will be able to create cards and assign those cards to different planning increments.The use case for All Boards would be if all of your organization followed the same delivery cadence. You can also choose specific boards to allow access to a Planning Series. This use case could look like wanting to separate out and differentiate your marketing organization’s planning series vs. your development organization’s planning series.
  3. Select Default Sub-Increment Range. This is the default duration for which a sub-increment will get created; 14 days is the default, given that there’s enough room in this overall PI to still have 14 days left to divide.
  4. Click Save.

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Figure 2 - List of existing Planning Series and Create icon

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Figure 3 - A Planning Series with boards selected

 

           

           

Viewing & Assigning Planning Series Information to Cards

Once a planning series is created, you will see the Planning Increments field on the right side of cards, (Figure 4a and b) where the board that this card is on has been given access to a Planning Series.

This enables teams to assign different increments to the cards on their board. If this were a portfolio board, perhaps you'll be committing epics to different program increments. If this were a team level board, you'd most likely be committing different features or user stories to different sprints.

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Figure 4a - Assigning a sprint to a Planning Increment on a card

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Figure 4b - Sprint assigned to a Planning Increment on a card

 

This card dropdown has the exact same view as in Figure 3, the exact same values that were defined in the Planning Series that this board has access to.

The Planning Increments field is a multi-select value for the purposes of saving forecasts and initiating an epic across multiple PIs. You have the ability to assign multiple values to a card in the Planning Increments field.

           

           

Bulk Edit/Multiple Assignment

You also have the ability to bulk edit a Planning Series. For example, if you’re doing some backlog grooming and sprint planning, you have the ability to select all cards, muti-select cards, right click, edit the selected cards, as well as and click Planning Increment on the dropdown and assign one or multiple planning increments at once. 

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Figure 4 - Additional options when using Planning Increments

           

           

Filtering Planning Series

You also have the ability to filter Planning Series. An example of this might be if you only want to see your cards that have been committed to, say, PI1.

To filter a Planning Series:

  1. Click the filter icon filtericon.png 
  2. Click Planning Series on the list. 

           

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Figure 5 - Filter Mode with Planning Series option

           

           

           

Reporting

Lastly, on the Home Screen, there’s a Reporting icon smallreportingicon.png. All Planning Series data is available through AgilePlace’s APIs and extracts. For example, you might want to view all the cards that have been assigned to Planning Increments today.

How to access the specific data source for Planning Increments:

  1. Click the Reporting icon.
  2. Click Reporting Data Extract.
  3. Click the Planning Increments data source.

           

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Figure 6 - Planning Increments Data Source on the Reporting Data Extract screen

           

You can adjust this extract into your BI tool of choice (Power BI or Tableaux) and all that information will be there and ready for you to consume in that tool.

Planning Series and time increment information will soon be available in AgilePlace's Power BI template as well.