The happy path of agile planning is around breaking down features and releasing them.

The required path is to itemize technical debt, business and technical operational needs, and compliance requirements into the plan and ensuring some of this work gets prioritized.

But many organizations leave our one crucial element of prioritization.

Monitor Releases for User and System-Level Feedback

Agile has teams planning, delivering, and releasing. But the release does not end when code is deployed to production.

Teams must consider what happens after the release. Consider

• What data is collected
• What data is confidential and sensitive
• How is data cleaned and joined
• Who gets access to the data
• How is it analyzed
• When and who reviews the data
• How is feedback incorporated back into planning

Product managers, architects, and delivery managers should be most concerned about that last point on how feedback gets incorporated into planning.

Some feedback requires an urgent response such as signs of instability, poor performance, or security issues. Other feedback can be quantified as defects – for when the team executed the requirements and met acceptance criteria, but users are responding and saying they need fixes or changes.

Other feedback should come qualitatively through interviews and dialog with end-users. The release may be working as designed, but users often tell you what they really need only after using it for some time.

Which is why StarCIO Agile Planning has a Monitoring step that feeds back into planning. Read more about it in the white paper, StarCIO Agile Planning: The Missing Practices to Gain Alignment and Achieve Great Results.