High-Level Estimation: L1
When a Product Manager (PM) first touches base with a lead or senior engineer to share a big-picture idea, we get a glimpse of the goals and scope of the initiative.
In this early stage, we have limited information, so we need to evaluate the problem we are trying to solve and provide a high-level estimate measured in the T-shirt sizing model. T-shirt Sizing is one of the Story points sizing techniques to estimate user stories used in agile projects. It's a relative Estimation Technique, rather than having T-shirts in sizes 4, 5, 6 etc, there are just a few sizes: Small (S), Medium (M), Large (L) and Extra Large (XL). This technique is used to forecast the effort required to work on each feature. As the ideation and exploration process evolves, some of these initiatives may be abandoned - for example, if the L1 estimate is deemed too high for the expected benefit of the initiative. However, usually they go-ahead to the next stage.
High-Level Estimation: L2
After this initial phase, it is time to involve the rest of the engineering team for the first time. As the PM shares goals and KPIs, the team begins to estimate the effort required by reviewing the designs, risks, dependencies and minimum requirements to complete the initiative. These estimates are done and measured in One Person per sprint. This unit measure considers the effort based on past experiences, internal debate and agreement among team engineers, for what a single developer might be able to achieve in a sprint while focused on a single initiative, in addition to the usual meetings, interviews, and operational bug fixes.
This stage is crucial for the whole POD to level their knowledge about everything that the initiative requires to be complete.
Capacity Planning
After completing the estimation for the implementation timeline, we have enough information to start the planning phase, considering the work capacity of the team. We take into account the number of available elements, vacations, bugs, refactoring and learning time. We use the concept of learning time to account for the ramp-up of any team members on relevant new skills and personal development objectives during the sprint. All these variables are taken into account to define an execution strategy and evaluate opportunity costs, thus creating a Capacity Plan.
Managers often struggle with challenges such as the following:
- Autonomous teams
- Shifting and conflicting priorities
- Tasks that are difficult to estimate
- Understanding actual work versus planned work.
With capacity planning, managers can better anticipate how long something will take to complete and if they have the right staff available to do the work.
In practice, we discovered these benefits of capacity planning:
1. Optimising project costs
Capacity planning lets you visualise what everyone is working on. It makes it possible to change upcoming task assignments and projects based on the team's skills as well as their availability.
For example, managers could decide whether it is worth delaying the start of the project by a week to reduce overall resource costs on the project. All the information is transparent, allowing managers to make the best decision on how to spend the budget.
2. Ensuring availability
Capacity planning shows what the demanded scope is to take on new projects. It reveals resource availability to avoid disappointing stakeholders or overstretching your team.
Any of your project plans are at risk when the team continually works overcapacity. They are more likely to take time off work with sickness or stress-related conditions.
3. Managing team expertise
When allocating someone to a task, you can quickly see if they are the right fit. Managers can also view collective skills at the team level and identify if it sufficiently maps to future strategic business initiatives or if you might have a skill shortage.
Skill shortages can exist at the broader team level or within a few key skills among a limited number of team members, highlighting the need for training, internal mentoring, or future recruiting strategies.
4. Allocating resources
Managers must be strategic about how they use their teams and on what. Capacity planning helps to balance the challenges of finding and allocating people to work effectively.
With the right people doing the right work, the success and predictability of projects across our organisation improves.
Roadmap
The Engineering Manager, Engineering Team Leader and Product Manager check the timeline resulting from the Capacity Plan to check if there is a need for adjustments due to dependencies and to validate if it is acceptable from a business/product standpoint.
This is the last chance to plan timeline optimization strategies like parallelising work within the team/other teams, to descope features and to get a balance between "done” and "perfectly done”.
Technical debt can also be mapped out.
After establishing the capacity plan, we are now able to proceed to the final stage of planning and roadmap creation, with the primary objective of formalising the implementation of the initiative and communicating the start and end date of the project to the organisation/with key stakeholders.
After a consensus between stakeholders (Product plus Engineering) is met, the commitment to
Lean Portfolio Management is carried out by creating Epics and projects in Jira.
