Planning & Prioritization

Given that we don't do Scrum. We don't really do formal "sprint planning". In fact we don't actually believe in the constraint of a "sprint".

Instead we focus on "roadmap planning" and "iteration planning". The destinction is that we do plan for an iteration (roughly a week or two out). However, that planning simply funnels into the Kanban board as to what we are targeting working on. If that changes as more information comes in it isn't a problem as we are just working down through the prioritized columns. This differs from the concept of formal sprints where a sprint's tickets are usually locked in until the following sprint.

We have a weekly Planning & Prioritization meetings.

Planning

During the Planning portion of the meeting we do the following.

  • quickly review the roadmap against all new information and make sure it still holds, adjusting as needed
  • review all the items in Selected for Dev column and determine where on the board the tickets should go. The Selected for Dev column needs to be empty at the end of the meeting. Items can go back to the backlog if needed.
  • make sure WIP limits are adhered to and we remove items from a column to make room for other higher priority tickets when the limit has been reached.

Prioritization

During the Prioritization portion of the meeting we do the following.

  • review the priority of the epics making sure they still hold, adjusting as needed
  • prioritize the tickets within each of the epics covering at least a few iterations worth of work out (making sure we prioritized work in the backlog if we complete all the work planned for this iteration).

Attendees

This meaning is owned & lead by Product but Engineers, QA, Design, etc. generally attend.