Effective online Agile Roadmap planning

I’m working together with teams from multiple locations and creating our quarterly roadmap has been a drag for years. We’ve used Google Sheets which is great for creating tables but is very bad for effectively plan and visualize our roadmap.

For Q3 I had the chance to participate in a beta version testing of Scrumile’s new Advanced PI planner. As we’ve been already using Scrumile for our standups, retrospecives, story refinement and team NPS tracking, so we gave it a try.

Planning

The planning when pretty smoothly for all our teams. Here is the process we’ve been following for the this part of the quarter:

• We had several missions that the teams could choose from, so we gave 2 hours for all the teams to sort out the missions between themselves the most effective way they could find. It amazed me that the teams even switched team members to be able to ship the missions faster.
• After all the teams had a mission, every team sat down and spent the remainder of the day on understanding the mission better. We did user-story to epic mapping and came up with the Epics.
• On the next day every team started to break down the epics into stories with user-story to story mapping.
• As our release train goes to production after every sprint all teams made sure to organize the epics and sprints so that they’d deliver something meaningful in every 2 weeks.
• Throughout these two days teams worked together with other teams on identifying potential dependencies between them.

Scrumile’s PI planner supported our planning days pretty greatly with online real-time editing of a roadmap. We’ve added epics, size and description and dependencies between them.

Tracking the quarter

As we all know a plan always sounds good but then reality hits in. Thankfully Scrumile’s PI planner has a nice integration with JIRA where we could track our progress against our plan.

It shows if we’ve finished early with an epic or we’re delayed with one.

Image from https://www.scrumile.com

With this visual aid we were able to make those hard decisions way faster than we did in the past.

We’ve loved the Advanced PI planner by Scrumile and we’ll definitely use it in our upcoming quarters.

Phil. T