Introduction

“Deliver value, iterate, and improve as you go.” - Kent Clothier (Author and Investor)

Decisions to make

• Set initial timeframes to guide a subset of the program’s work items (associated with an initiative, project, or epic) into the more rigorous planning activities that follow
• Choose tracking vehicles (with target dates) to improve visibility into both delivery releases and the desired outcomes driven by the program work

Context

• Organizations typically have a wide variety of approaches used for planning delivery, so identifying those approaches is critical to being able to plan value delivery
• Features at this point have been identified, refined, and sized so that they can be targeted

Why we care

• Planning for successful delivery requires putting an initial set of “stakes in the ground”
• Evaluation occurs by measurement, but the up-front targeting of work sets the baseline for follow-on comparison

The Atlassian view

• Jira Align is built around planning in planning periods (i.e. program increments) and a need for business agility implies that it would be wasteful to create detailed plans farther out than one quarter, given the uncertainty
• Targeting work to a planning period does not (yet) yield a plan, or a commitment, rather it is a way to collect work against a timeframe for the next round of planning
  • This next round of planning will usually drive a re-targeting of some work items, often pushing them out into later timeframes
• Jira Align supports targeting the completion of work to specific dates when needed, but this is usually shed as leadership gets more comfortable with timebox-based roadmaps and planning
• Jira Align supports the bundling of work (i.e. features) into release vehicles, which specify a ship date. Releases are the earliest target of when the value has the potential of being realized