Agle Team Iteration Planning

[DomD_]

Hi All, When planning an iteration in Agile we are asked to enter the team's focus and capacity. What are your best practices for determining capacity for a team with multiple roles? For example, if a website team has one designer, two front end developers, three back end developers, and one analyst, having one number for capacity is not accurate. Obviously, the roles with more headcount can work on more stories than roles with less, but this allocation is not apparent during sprint planning. The workaround we may implement is having separate sprints for each role, but this would definitely be less efficient and transparent than keeping all of the team's work in one sprint. Looking forward to your ideas on how to make the capacity field more flexibile while still retaining the out-of-the-box benefits. Thank You, Dom Dominic D'Alessandro

[VicAl]

Well a Scrum Coach would tell you each team member is supposed to be able to work on everything (i.e. not specific roles). At least that's what they taught us. However, I've found this to be unrealistic. I think the best way to approach it is to remember it's an estimate. And like all estimates, it's imperfect. So don't drive yourself crazy. As you start completing Sprints, you'll have real data to see how you're tracking and you'll continue to adjust the Capacity (aka Velocity) as you see fit with each Sprint. This will be true of both the focus and the capacity. And don't forget to account for team member time off in the focus and capacity. And remember if you get your work done before the Sprint deadline, you can always grab the next Backlog item and continue working. Personally, I just put the Focus at 100% and use Capacity as my unit of measure. This way I only have to tinker with one measurement to track and adjust, instead of doing a balancing act with two of them. But I'm sure others have a different preference. I don't recommend creating extra hoops for yourself to jump through (i.e. a sprint per role). You'll start to spend more time tracking and managing your work, rather than performing the actual work. And of course there's the risk of impending insanity �� . Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT | Sr. IT Project Manager Denver Water | t: (303-628-7262) | c: (303-319-6473) "http://www.denverwater.org/"> http://www.denverwater.org INTEGRITY | VISION | PASSION | EXCELLENCE | RESPECT