Agile Program Management
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 Value
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 agile work on a program Kanban board.
- We can break down agile work, adding to the program backlog and estimating size, value, or complexity as appropriate.
- We can customize Kanban boards to reflect existing portfolio processes.
- We can sequence agile work by size, value, and capability considerations.
- We can create aligned autonomy by associating work on team and program boards to the portfolio Kanban board.
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 customize Kanban boards to reflect each program’s preferred processes.
- We can visualize all planned and unplanned agile work on a program Kanban board.
- We can break work down into smaller increments, adding them to the program backlog and estimating size, value, or complexity as appropriate.
- We can dynamically prioritize and sequence features in the context of size, value, and team capacity and velocity considerations.
- 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, such as 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 agile work is tracking with completion goals, the impact of any unplanned agile work, 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.
- We can customize Kanban boards to reflect a team’s existing process or preferred work methodology, including Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, and more.
- We can track progress and assess efficiency with agile metrics, including flow, velocity, throughput, and cycle time. These metrics can enact a culture of continuous improvement by adjusting boards to reflect any required process changes.
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
Agile program management enables your organization to plan, prioritize, and optimize the delivery of program work using quarterly or program increment (PI) 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 processes. Agile program management allows organizational initiatives to be coordinated quickly and effectively, with clarity into the value delivered.
Video: Agile Program Management Demo
Program Backlog Management Process Steps
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 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. For more information: |
|
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. |
|
Carry out visual capacity planning |
Using the previously defined WIP limits, schedule features for specific timeboxes, such as program increments (PIs). |
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Schedule features into appropriate timebox (e.g., sprint) |
Schedule the feature cards into available timeboxes, such as program increments (PIs). Use the Agile Planning Series view to visualize how planned work at the program-level aligns to a higher-level planning series, such as a quarterly increments. |
Program Execution Process Steps
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. |
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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. |