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Planview Customer Success Center

Agile Program Management

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Agile Program Management

The Agile Program Management capability’s enablers include Program Backlog Management, Team of Teams Planning and Management, and Program Execution. Each capability within the Planview Capability Framework has a distinct set of features and functionality, business processes, best practices, and analytics and reports that deliver value to customers in the form of specific business outcomes.

Enablers and Business Outcomes

Program Backlog Management

Supports program backlog management, visualizing all work on program Kanban boards aligned to a preferred work methodology and process. Resulting business outcomes include:

  • We can visualize all planned and unplanned features on a program Kanban board.
  • We can customize Kanban boards to reflect each program’s preferred processes.
  • We can break down epics into features, adding them to the program backlog and estimating size, value, or complexity as appropriate.

Teams of Teams Planning and Management

Provides a structure to carry out quarterly planning. It provides teams and teams of teams with a way to visualize, plan, and coordinate organizational initiatives quickly, effectively, and with clarity into the value delivered. Resulting business outcomes include:

  • We can dynamically prioritize and sequence features in the context of size, value and team capacity/velocity considerations.
  • We can easily and effectively carry out both in-person or virtual quarterly planning. We can use the visualization of the Kanban boards to balance priorities, sequence work, and communicate realistic delivery timelines.
  • We can easily visualize connections between and across teams to understand dependencies, proactively anticipate issues, and mitigate risks.
  • We can carry out visual capacity planning at the program level by utilizing work-in-progress limits on the program Kanban board.
  • We can systematically track how efficiently teams of teams can deliver work within a fixed period of time (e.g. Program Increment) and use this data to inform future capacity planning and management.

Program Execution

Supports agile team of teams’ ability to execute and track the program plan. Resulting business outcomes include:

  • We can see if planned features are tracking with completion goals, the impact of any unplanned features, and the likelihood of achieving planned delivery dates.
  • We can foster continuous improvement with insights and analytics into delivery trends across the team of teams.
  • We can measure effectiveness, identify and remove bottlenecks, anticipate future issues, and adapt program workflow to optimize performance.

Best Practices

Create relationships between your deliverables

Use parent and child card features to gain visibility into how your work is connected and align teams’ work with higher-level strategies. This allows you to effectively manage your board, your work between related teams, and delivery of key results in your epic.

Work in shorter cycles

By planning work in increments—typically two-week sprints—you can deliver value and maximize focus and flexibility. Shorter work cycles also mean you can receive and apply feedback from customers and stakeholders more quickly, so you can deliver what’s most important.

Foster collaboration between teams

Teams with interrelated work should coordinate and plan together to deliver work in unison. Emphasizing value over time efficiency encourages collaboration between teams and can lead to improved efficiency in their respective value streams. Using Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits to focus teams on a set number of active projects can further encourage cross-team collaboration to complete work or resolve any blockages.

Embrace continuous change

Making constant improvements is important for meeting changing conditions and continuously moving forward. Lean and agile metrics help assess how effective teams and teams of teams are in delivering value, while shorter work cycles help teams implement changes and feedback quickly.

Prioritize delivering value

When success in agile is defined by delivering value to customers, it’s important to prioritize work that is most closely aligned with what customers need. Align work to high-level objectives across all value streams to ensure teams and teams of teams are working on what matters to customers.

Processes and Reports

conceptual image_agile program management.jpg 

Agile program management enables your organization to plan, prioritize, and optimize the delivery of program work using quarterly/program increment planning and teams of teams. To achieve this, the program plan and connected work is visualized across program and team-level Kanban boards. Teams of teams have visibility into current and backlogged work in the program plan, which they break down into units of work that illustrate dependencies and risks, then deliver in timeboxes using their preferred work methodology or process. Agile program management allows organizational initiatives to be coordinated quickly and effectively, with clarity into the value delivered.

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Program Backlog Management Process Steps

           

Program Backlog Mgmt.jpg

Program backlog management process flow

           

Process Step Description
Create features Break epics down into discrete features for the teams to break into stories.
Describe and categorize features Clearly define a goal for each feature that teams can work toward.
Estimate size Realistically assess the scope of the work that will be required to complete each feature.

For more information:
 
Capture relevant prioritization information Rate each feature using criteria to determine how much value the feature will deliver and how long the feature will take to complete. 

           

           

Team of Teams Planning and Management Process Steps

           

Team of Teams Planning and Mgmt.jpg

Team of teams planning and management

           

Process Step Description
Set capacity for each team using WIP limits Create Work in Progress (WIP) limits for each timebox, such as program increments, to set reasonable expectations for the capacity in each timebox.

Use card scoring to rank and prioritize features

Add cards with work you want to evaluate to the Card Scoring panel in AgilePlace, and select a metric or custom template to measure cards against the criteria most relevant to your team's purpose. 

Card scoring provides you a visual snapshot of your most valuable work by value, urgency, cost, and alignment to your organization's overall strategy.

For more information:

Carry out visual capacity planning

 Schedule features for specific timeboxes (such as program increments), respecting the previously set WIP limits to avoid overloading teams.

For more information:
 

Schedule features into appropriate timebox (e.g., sprint)

 Spread feature cards across the available timeboxes to avoid overloading teams with work.

           

           

Program Execution Process Steps

           

Program Execution .jpg

Program execution process flow

           

Process Step Description

Deliver features through underlying stories

 Agile teams develop and complete user stories for the features to deliver business value. Features are complete when all underlying stories are finished.

Monitor progress through key results

Associate relevant AgilePlace cards to the key results. The cards should represent the activities to be completed to achieve the key results.

Periodically review the current state of key results to see whether teams are making progress toward the objective.

           

Related Capabilities

Supported Solutions