Agile teams can’t wait till the end of a release to begin planning the next one. The time gap it creates is a tremendous loss of productivity. Furthermore, this approach to planning doesn’t simplify drafting roadmaps and forecasts that many organizations require from their agile teams.

And while there are many benefits from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), its Program Increment (PI) planning may not be suitable for many smaller and medium-sized development organizations. PI prescribes dedicating an innovation and planning iteration and scheduling two full days for the planning meeting. This may be a practical way to align and plan an agile release train for large development organizations that dedicate themselves to all the rigors of SAFe. It also promotes other activities like learning during this sprint.

However, this is terribly inefficient for midsize development organizations with five to sixty development teams.

Prescriptive approaches to scaling agile may be the only practical way to scale a standardize agile practice across very large, geographically distributed organizations. But the rigor may also prevent organizations from driving an agile culture and mindset. Changing the culture requires organizations to enable leaders, high potentials, and a diverse group of individual contributors to participate in crafting and maturing the agile practice.

Introducing StarCIO Agile Planning

This is why StarCIO Agile Planning, a toolkit of methodologies, practices, and tools was developed and is now available. The toolkit enables agile organizations to define planning practices around how backlogs are filled with new features, technical debt fixes, user experience enhancements, and operational improvements. The approach helps shape the successful delivery of new digital products and capabilities, and to continue improving them through normalized release cycles.

Our first white paper, StarCIO Agile Planning: The Missing Practices to Gain Alignment and Achieve Great Results, is coming out next week! Please consider signing up for it!