Capacity Planning for Dynamic Teams
Fixed price (and fixed scope) projects dominate the offshore industry. These projects have offshore/onsite teams. They often have large team size (over 100s of people in one team).
Agile thinking uses team velocity/ throughput and uses that to project an end date (Kanban system) or how much scope can be accomplished in a given time duration (number of sprints in SCRUM). They assume a stable team. However, this is not applicable for projects. They experience resource and productivity ramp-up issues. Often, resources keep changing as new projects come in. Projects do not have past velocity or throughput data. Extrapolating historical data from other similar projects, though possible, is inaccurate for multiple reasons.
This talk is based on our experience of working with such project teams. They want to adopt agile methods. We show how they can adopt the Kanban Method and yet do: A) Initial Capacity Planning B) Assess the impact of scope creep to the project end date.
The session assumes a basic understanding of the Kanban method.
Outline/Structure of the Experience Report
1. Explain the challenges and difficulties of Fixed Price projects when they start adopting Agile principles.
2. Show how capacity planning can be done in such teams
3. Show how to assess the impact of Scope Change
Learning Outcome
At the end of this session, you will be to apply these methods for Capacity Planning and impact for Scope changes to your Capacity Plan in a fixed project project.
Target Audience
Senior people in delivery organizations, Process Managers
Links
As a speaker, I have given many webinars. They are available on Digite YouTube channel. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb70qNFsfB0
My blogs are at http://www.swiftkanban.com/blog/sudipta-lahiri and http://sudi-thoughts.blogspot.com/
I was also a panel speaker on Agile 2013 "Agile and Innovation". The selection committee can get access to it.
schedule Submitted 7 years ago
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• Longer duration to complete the change requests and ensuring an on-time delivery
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• Prioritize the change requests by highest business/end user value (Input Cadence)
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• Focused on speed in delivering change request by eliminating waste
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• Manage impediments , making blockers visible
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If I say, culture is important to adopting Agile, most people will just agree without even thinking too much about it. But what is meant by "culture"? Why is it important?
Culture is not typical behaviour; it is not what we say we value (but don't actually do). Culture is our basic assumptions of how things work. Culture is the logic we use to think through and respond to any particular situation.
If you imagine a pyramid, Agile practice and any other visible behaviour is on the top, stated or written Agile values and principles are in the middle, fundamental assumptions (aka culture) is at the base.
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NOTE: I will be updating the attached slides as when I created them, I was framing it more as "doctrine" rather than "culture", defined as fundamental assumptions"
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