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Planning for Multiple Teams

An extension to the Quarterly Planning Tool

How do I plan for multiple teams in parallel?​

The quarterly planning tool and process are easily extendable to multiple teams. This is mostly relevant when multiple teams own the same product, or share the same stakeholder with similar KPIs and goals. In such cases, cross-team dependencies are high, and commitments will likely be asked on a group level, rather than from individual teams.

 

Some points to consider when conducting multi-team quarterly planning:​​​

  • What are the joint goals the teams must deliver?

  • Which team is best positioned to own each epic?

  • What are the dependencies between the teams?

  • All teams should preferably (but not necessarily) use the same scoring scale and format (e.g. 15 story points per engineering per sprint). This will make prioritization and assignment discussions across teams easier.

  • Each team should build its own plan, and provide its own commitments.

  • When and how will knowledge sharing take place?

 

From a tooling perspective, the extension is as follows (in this example we show a 3 team set up):

  • Add a new column to indicate the owner team (uses a preset list and validation rule to avoid typos)

  • Duplicate the capacity and planned rows per each team, and extend formulas and conditional formatting accordingly.

  • Add a filter on column C to allow single team view

 

The process itself remains mostly the same, with the following emphasis:

  • Step 1 - The group owner updates the sheet to align with next quarter schedule. Engineering leads provide capacity per sprint for each of their teams.

  • Steps 2-4 - Each team should go through these steps (listing epics, breaking down to USs, estimation) independently

  • Step 5 - As cross team dependencies are high, step 5 should be done jointly. During this time, epics and user stories may shift between teams, and additional work may be identified in support of integration and/or knowledge transfer.

  • Step 6 - As such cases usually require, the entire group might be expected to communicate commitments jointly. Depending on how you go about it, this may be done in a single joint meeting, or several break-out sessions culminating in a joint summary forum.

 

With these simple steps, a 3-team planning format will look as follows: ​

Conditional formatting works the same way as the single team tool. to illustrate, in the example below:

  • Team A has overcommitted for the whole quarter

  • Team A has also overcommitted in its last 2 sprints

  • Team B has zero buffer in sprint Q1-4

Each team can of course filter the list to have a cleaner dedicate view of its own plan. When applying the filter, the tool reduces to a single team view (go here for the single team tutorial):

Ready to to give it a go? -- Download a copy of the tool now.

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© 2022 Asaf Bord. All rights reserved.

v4.4.0

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