9 Effective planning and collaboration

 
Meetings that organize iterations  

This chapter covers

  • The central role of iterating toward a goal
  • The importance of preparation for collaboration
  • How tasks shape collaboration
  • How task descriptions create productive collaboration
  • A framework for better task descriptions
  • Questions that promote better preparation for an implementation iteration
  • The surprising factor in participation that many businesses fail to implement, and the multi-billion dollar cost of this failure
  • The value of estimation, compared with the value of retrospectives

Agile claims to deliver implementation flexibility and accountability. It does so by focusing the team on short iterative work plans, where significant functionality is implemented, tested, code reviewed, and debugged to the level of being visible through a demonstration of new functionality.

Agile project management tools help create a record of who did what work and why work was done the way it was done. Everyone on a project team knows what tasks were completed for each iteration, advancing a project toward completion. Then they collaborate to decide what gets done next.

Iterations are a simple idea. Books on Agile often start with the advantages of iteration. They then go on to describe Scrum, Kanban, or some other variant of Agile. Those books emphasize how to do a particular kind of Agile project management, but not why.

9.1 Iteration

9.1.1 Coordinate, then iterate

9.2 Moving tasks toward completion

9.2.1 Tasks are the foundation of the agenda

9.2.2 Making tasks ready for a meeting agenda

9.2.3 Iteration, learning, and changes

9.2.4 Questions, not process

9.3 Task descriptions as a bulwark of project viability

9.3.1 INVEST and task descriptions

9.3.2 Questions to ask about tasks

9.4 Estimating the size of a task

9.4.1 Estimating

9.4.2 Not estimating

9.4.3 Risk or time?

9.5 Making meetings inclusive

9.5.1 Bias in meetings

9.5.2 Identifying biases

9.5.3 Practical inclusiveness

9.6 Has Agile been stretched beyond the breaking point?

9.7 Exercises for Chapter 9

9.8 Summary