The Agile Projector

The process of Projecting is a give and take between utilization (how busy you can keep everyone / how much parallelization is possible) and delivery priorities and dates. We advise the following:

1. Prioritize the work along with desired delivery dates
2. Optimize the plan for maximum utilization, delivering in the desired order
3. Then assess the dates produced in step 2. If you need to pull in a date or dates, trade off utilization until your plan achieves them. This will often mean that lower priorities deliverables move out and utilization goes down. We often see these utilization gaps held open for unexpected work, special projects that can be interrupted, and opportunistic quick wins.

You will find that after the first Projection, subsequent changes are much simpler to make and maintain as the starting point is more organized and understood.

There are a lot of use cases that The Agile Projector supports – any Project where your teams are mostly dedicated to the Issues it contains, the Issues are sizable and dependencies can be identified, and there is mostly a single-owner of the Issue during its Projected lifecycle. It all depends on how you structure your teams and the nature of the work you are doing.

The Agile Projector pushes the updated assignees and ranks back into Jira, allowing your team to see their assignments in the order in which they should be worked on in Jira based on the Projection you built. In fact, they never need to leave Jira or see the Projector themselves to know what work they need to do.

A Snapshot captures the state of the Projector at the point in time you create it. This includes builders, issues and their attributes, assignments and sequence.

Snapshots are often used to create multiple ‘what if’ scenarios to compare together. These can be shared with other stakeholders in order to align on a course of action. When a Snapshot is chosen, you can load it and Push to Jira to make it official!

Jira uses the Rank field to sort your Issues. Many use this to indicate the order of work to be done. The Agile Projector uses Rank the same way at a per-developer level – sorting and indicating the order in which each Issue should be worked on by its Assignee.

It’s important to build in a buffer – which means blocking out time.

The most straightforward way is to rotate Builder availability using OOTO blocks for time they are taking tickets. You can exclude the tickets from being Projected by making them an Issue type that you do not pull in.

Another common approach is to simply exempt the dedicated ticket taking Builders from being assigned Project work.

A third, excellent approach is to simply hold capacity open in your Projections and when work comes in, put it in the gaps.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the whole point of Projecting is to be able to accommodate change gracefully. So systems that involve a lot of change are a golden use case!

A Builder is automatically imported when you Pull from Jira and they are assigned to an Issue you retrieve.

Note: If a Builder on the team has no Issues assigned and you have never pulled them before, they will not show up in your Projector.

Each Builder is considered unique per Projector manager.

Sometimes Builders move off the team or to another team. On the User page, you can “hide” a Builder and they will not show up in your Projectors until the next time they are assigned to an Issue you pull, or you load a Snapshot they were included in.

You can export your Projector at any time by clicking Export CSV, which will allow you to capture all the planning data points for historical, sharing and reporting purposes.

We find that the best practice here is to simply look at the average effort days of the bugs you receive and set that as the default for the Bugs you create. While any given Bug might be more or less, on average it will contribute to a more stable schedule.

You can always change the effort days on anything at any time. The Projector is built to make it easy to accommodate that!

Click on the Epic badge in the Projector and it will show you all the Issues belonging to that Epic. This makes it easy to see how it is Projected to progress. Click it again to remove the filter.

Just hover over the blocker in the Blocked By column and you will see the blocking issue highlight. To make it even easier to find the blocking Issue, you can also click on the blocker to filter everything out but the blocking Issue. Click it again to remove the filter.

Check the JQL of your configuration. Common causes include Issues not having effort days set, or being in a status that is not included in your query.

Focus mode allows you to see more of the schedule at a time by hiding the Builder header row. This can sometimes make large scale rearrangement easier to manage. You can toggle it on and off in the Projector via the Focus Mode button.

While the most common use case for The Agile Projector is software development teams and the software development process, there are other types of teams and team members and we want to be able to include them all without introducing change or confusion. Besides, it’s kind of nice to think of yourself as a “Builder”, isn’t it?