Course: Improve Team Predictability

Software teams work on complex and ever-changing work, and the work items that they complete can vary widely from one day to the next.  This makes it challenging to be able to estimate, plan and predict what work can be completed within a given timeframe.

This ability to predict how much work a team can do is critical to being able to plan larger bodies of work, whether multi-week initiatives and features, or scaling work across multiple teams.

Stakeholders and managers often want to know "when will this be ready in production?"  Delivery managers want to know where the bottlenecks and dependencies are so that they can coordinate and communicate milestones better.

By increasing predictability, it becomes possible to plan and coordinate large programs of work, and multiple teams working together, with a great deal of cerrtainty that teams can deliver to estimated timelines and deliverables.

This course is for people working in Agile software development, whether Scrum or Kanban or otherwise, and who needs to demonstrate performance improvements.

Types of roles that should attend this course include; Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Agile Project Managers, Product Owners, Delivery Leads, Product Managers, Delivery Managers, Iteration Managers, and so on. 

This course is open to any members of an IT team, and also to managers who need to better understand delivery challenges and how to overcome them.

This course is for people anywhere from beginner to advanced skills in Agile delivery or project delivery.  It is designed to help teams improve their performance by increasing the predictability of how much work they can deliver within a timeframe.

Many teams are being asked to estimate or predict when a group of work items will be completed.  When there is low predictability, the team must spend time estimating the work items and understanding them in detail to be able to predict when they might be completed by.

This course improves upon this situation by making work items very similar and consistent in size, such that if the number of work items to be completed are known, then it is a trivial task to determine how long it will take to complete them.

MODULE 1

Manage risks and issues

• How to identify risks and issues that impact the predictability of your team, and prevent them from impacting the team
• How to track and report risks and issues to keep your stakeholders informed
• How to escalate risks and problems that you may not be able to resolve in your team

MODULE 2

Improve estimation and capacity management

• How to identify Sprint-level planning and estimation challenges
• How to learn from past experience to improve future estimation
• How to improve estimates so that they become more accurate

MODULE 3

Create small, same-sized work items for consistency

• How to create same-sized work items to improve consistency and predictability
• How to correctly measure Cycle Time and Lead Time
• How to reduce Cycle Time and Lead Time to increase predictability

MODULE 4

Measuring and improving team predictability

• How to measure predictability using data from your team's task management tool
• How to improve this measure of predictability by reducing Lead Time distribution
• How you can replace the manual process of estimating a backlog of work with a way of using probability to predict when your team should complete the work

This training course can be delivered face to face, or online format.  When presented face to face, it will require 2 days.  When viewing online, it is self-paced but allow between 5 to 8 hours in total.

This course teaches how to make work items of a similar size, and small size, so that predicting when they will be completed becomes a very simple task.  There are multiple benefits this achieves:

1. The predictability of the team can be measured, and the team's improvement in their predictability can be tracked over time.  

2. In the process of reducing the size of work items, the Lead Time is reduced, and this is another measurable performance improvement that represents cost reductions and reduced time to deliver value to customers.

3. This course also teaches how to identify and manage risks before they become issues that impact delivery.  It is possible to report the reduced impact of risks upon delivery and timeliness.  Costs can be attributed to risk impacts, and then those costs are counted as savings if the risk has been avoided or minimised.

4. When a team has sufficiently high predictability, it is possible to predict completion dates without having to estimate work.  The team can count savings from avoiding time spent doing estimation, and means the team can focus more time and effort on delivering valuable work.  So the time normally spent in estimation activities for the team can be counted as a cost saving.