Agile 101: Iteration Planning

Tom Mochal, PgMP, PMP, TSPM is the president of TenStep, Inc., a methodology development, consulting and training company. Tom won the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Project Management Institute for his work spreading knowledge of project management around the world. He is a speaker, lecturer, instructor and consultant to companies and organizations around the world.

  Agile   Estimating   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

On an agile project, the workload is determined at the beginning of each iteration. The Product Owner evaluates and prioritizes the work that needs to be done, while the team determines the amount of work they can complete. The iteration planning meeting sets the stage and should be run as a collaborative dialogue.

One of the unique aspects of an Agile project is that the workload is determined at the beginning of each iteration. Unlike traditional projects, the workload is not laid out months and months in advance. There is only a need for detailed planning for the upcoming iteration. (The product backlog can be mapped at a high-level to future iterations, but the detailed planning takes place one iteration at a time.) This allows an Agile project to be flexible in its workload and sensitive to changes in customer needs and priorities.  

At the beginning of every iteration the Product Owner and the project team meet to determine the workload for that iteration. During the meeting the Product Owner evaluates the product backlog and simply pulls off the next set of user stories that are of the highest priority. This level of effort to complete the user story may already have been estimated when the story was added. If not, the team estimates the work in the planning meeting. This estimate may take the form of actual effort hours, but it is more likely the …

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