The disappearing calendar

I've had a few blog posts floating through my head for months - and now a business trip gives me an opportunity to let them float through the pipes of the internet.

A lot of agile methodology is around estimating and working in small increments to drive better predictability of delivery date.  I've teneded to find that as a product gets more mature and installed at more customer locations, it takes a longer period of time to close out a release.  The agile planning helps with the earlier phases, but at the end we need a little bit different planning and monitoring tool.

Whiteboard to the rescue!  As we get near the end of a release cycle, I often draw a calendar on a whiteboard.  I usually draw this in front of the whole team, and I draw the weekends on the calendar as well.  Then I grab an eraser and wipe off all the Saturdays and Sundays.  Then I erase any holidays or company events.  Then I ask the team where to mark the milestones like truly feature complete, feature testing complete, and regression testing complete.  Each day after that at the scrum, I erase the previous day.

I think this exercise does a couple interesting things.  First, the concept of "weeks" can sound like a lot - as in "oh, I'm sure we'll be done with that in a couple weeks".  When you draw the calendar and erase the non-working days, you're now looking at an exact number of boxes.  Second, when you start putting marks on this calendar, you see how close together things really are.  If you say you're feature complete on Tuesday and you say that you'll be done feature testing by Friday, it's clear there's only two boxes between those days.  Hopefully feature testing has been going on during the development iterations, but having the calendar illustrates the margin of error.

Lastly, erasing the days helps illustrate the sense of urgency.  The calendar is getting physically smaller on the whiteboard which should raise some questions about whether there's enough boxes left.

Here's hoping your calendar has all the days you need!

Comments

[Scranton Web Design]

Great post, really enjoyed it. Great blog.