Why are we so afraid to show temporary or early drafts of plans to our teams, and why are we so obsessed with planning reveals at kick-offs?
I don’t know, but it seems to be our ways-of-working when it comes to planning, road-mapping, or defining objectives. We have this idea that planning only involves the product owner/lead/manager and relevant stakeholders. We tend to have a non-transparent process of what the quarterly - or half-year plans will look like until we do the final unveil at the next “kick-off” with the rest of the team.
Is it because the team cannot understand the complexity of aligning feature requests with relevant stakeholders and the unfortunate politics that this process entitles? Or is it that we will not bother the team with those unnecessary details until they are fully baked and unable to change for the next half-year?
Let us be transparent as product owners as we expect our teams to be. Our team’s development process is entirely out in the open. At any time, I can access the team’s Kanban board to see who is working on what, and I can see the team’s progress. I am even fortunate enough to evaluate the team’s performance metrics through burndown/up charts. Whenever I need something clarified, I can ask questions at dailies or directly as comments on the story itself. So should the team not expect the same from me when it comes to planning?
Planning Going Forward
Here is how I am going to make plans for my teams going forward. My idea is to adopt the same principles of openness and similar tools as the team already uses.
I will plan by using objectives with a series of proposed acceptance criteria on them. I will create those as milestones or epics in the same tool as the team uses, so we have the added benefit of linking stories directly to these objectives. I will invite the team to monitor the objectives continuously and contribute to those directly or through commenting.
Hopefully, at kick-offs, everyone would have had a chance to see the objectives beforehand, and some might even have commented and influenced those objectives.
Transparency
I would like to have a dashboard somewhat modeled after a Kanban board so that the team can continuously see current -, upcoming -, and recently closed objectives. The upcoming objectives will either be in a finalized - or draft state and a link to where it is possible to contribute to the objective.
Using an approach previously discussed, I would be able to show ongoing progress on current objectives.
The dashboard can be blown up on a big screen tv within the team area or shared with whoever works remotely or with relevant stakeholders.
Will it Work?
I am curious about the implication this might have; will the team be more involved with planning, and how would stakeholders feel about planning in the open?
Planning in the open will be my commitment for 2021, so only time will tell if this will succeed. I am confident that playing with an open deck of cards in a game of Planning Poker is much better than keeping them to only a select few.