Agile budgeting: How to do Continuous Planning, Delivery and Funding (Part 2)

Continued from Last Post

Let’s try to understand how the typical traditional Project Plan at Project/Portfolio level works. This will give us some insight into how the detailed and NOT comprehensive view of the Project Plan gives details but lacks what is called Overhead and Unproductive work. Typical portfolio for example looks the following over a period of 3 years for 3 different Product lines and a KTLO engagement.

But Agile Budgeting and Delivery uses the principle of lean agile principle to move away from “Detailed Project Plan” to what is called “Cadence” based management, ie move away from Project based work to a cadence based work which essentially looks something like below ie based on EPICs rather than stand alone Projects.

The above is based on the Q releases ie Q1 , Q2 etc of usually 8 to 12 Weeks. This means it based on this Cadence of Releases rather than a Project Release which spans across Q1, Q2 etc. But to make this successful these are the requirements

1) The teams are stable teams ie they are dedicated and not dismantled after releases.

2) Plan all the work ie Plan all EPICS since we have stable teams

3) There are teams of teams (for scaling )

4) Respect the Teams Velocities rather than the work delivered in Project Based model.

5) Move from the Project based work to Continuous Delivery Model ie this builds up a consistent Velocity of work and High Quality Assets (For example , Continuous Integration (CI) and Test Automation )

6) Build End to End System Level Capabilities

7) Build Competitive advantage for the future ie platform or waste reduction etc.

8) All above are an investment which cannot be done is Project based Model

In Summary:

Business Case and Decision Making: Note that Business Case and Decision Making is always linked in Agile ways of working. You always go back to Decision Makers ie Stakeholders if you need to make changes to the Scope or Time

to be continued