Planning

Planning always happens in relation to a particular period, a particular task, and a particular team. Planning is initiated and led by the customer of the task in question, who must already have an idea of the task and a target deadline in mind. The customer in question, by conducting the planning process, can be understood as asking:

"Can this task be accomplished in this period with this team, and if so, how?"

The goal of the planning process is to answer this question.

Planning - parts of which are typically done synchronously by the customer and performer(s) - proceeds as follows:

  1. The customer decides to start planning the task, at which point they immediately mark it In Planning.

  2. Review the last planning conducted for this task, if applicable, and agree on any retrospective reflections / conclusions.

  3. If the customer and performer agree that the task is sufficiently well-defined and that the deadline is achievable:

    1. The task is marked as Planned, with the performer and estimated date of completion added.
    2. Planning terminates.

  4. If the customer and performer agree that the task is sufficiently well-defined, but the performer thinks that the deadline is not achievable, planning fails (and can be restarted with a different task and/or different deadline).

  5. Otherwise, the customer leads threefold decomposition, with the help of the performer as necessary:

    1. Decomposition of the task in question into sub-tasks.
    2. Decomposition of the team in question into sub-teams.
    3. Decomposition of the period in question into sub-periods.

    The task, team, and period do not always need to be simultaneously decomposed; often it will make sense to first decompose the task, for example.

  6. Planning then recurs for each of these sub-tasks, sub-teams, and sub-periods. This can result in two outcomes:

    1. Success, in which case the sub-task dependencies, appropriate performer, and estimate are added to the original task, and planning terminates.
    2. Failure, in which case the customer can choose whether to give up (planning fails) or try with a different decomposition (back to step 4).

Planning, in general, proceeds "right-to-left" on a task DAG, starting with a higher-level task and building up the dependency graph which must be completed in order to complete it.

Next, see starting.