The Agile Projector

So why don’t we treat it that way?

From a traditional Agile standpoint, a backlog is treated as a prioritized list for the whole team to‬ pick off the top of. In real life, because there are dependencies, that list needs to be executed‬ on in a certain order. In other words, the list is actually a tree.

Agile doesn’t do a great job recognizing and dealing with this truth and tends to take two general paths:

1. Accommodate the calendar impacts of unplanned blockers through various statistical methods (e.g., throughput, historical velocity, Fibonacci story pointing, etc.) and then predict delivery timelines from there. This doesn’t obviate the need to track, manage, and hold work until it becomes unblocked by its dependencies. Often this requires a lot of meetings, checking-in, and ultimately context switching when the blocker is cleared.
2. Make Issues so large and generic that they encompass most of their dependencies. This creates a large over/under on the actual clarity and time frame for delivering the work, leading to a lot of discovery along the way, and, you guessed it, lots of meetings, checking-in, and wild swings in calendar predictability and the amorphous understandings of what will ultimately be delivered.

The Agile Projector was written to transform this tree into a schedule through just a couple of simple rules:

1. Size the items in effort days (keep them small – 5 days or fewer). Defining smaller units of work requires a level of understanding of the design and work to be done that helps minimize surprises and schedule swings.
2. Indicate dependencies (“is blocked by”). This gives us our tree.

Now imagine this tree having branches that are the length of the effort days for each upstream node, and then rotate it 90 degrees over a calendar.

Now imagine that you have a set of people who can crawl the tree (some are better at some nodes than others).

Doing this manually would be really hard! No wonder very few did before The Agile Projector came along. And no wonder so many are in a place of frustrated resignation with their lot, and Agile is down and maybe out for the count.

The Agile Projector lets you play out different assignment scenarios (who, what, and in what order) to optimize and predict how and when each node will be delivered. Through the two-way sync capabilities, these assignment plans appear in Jira to your developer as personalized backlogs.

Making it simple to recognize and respond to the reality that the backlog is a tree is a game-changer for predictability, process efficiency, and morale through fewer meetings, panicked re-allocations, silent feature and quality compromises, and unplanned death marches to dates.