Many who are reading this may already be in the midst of implementing an Agile strategy, or some might be evaluating the benefits of using the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) by Scaled Agile, Inc. to implement a framework for Agile delivery. This blog will examine how resource capacity planning fits in with scaled Agile delivery and how it affects flow. SAFe describes portfolio flow as a state where lean portfolio management (LPM) can provide a continuous flow of new epics to Agile release trains (ART) and solution trains to achieve the portfolio’s vision and strategic themes.
Early Alignment of Delivery to Available Capacity Accelerates Flow
To align delivery to available capacity, program managers and release train engineers must look beyond the current planning interval, or PI. When a team is inside of the 90-day period of a current PI, forecasts are fixed, the work has been assigned and is being completed. The real benefits from resource capacity planning are accessed when looking to future PIs, where forecasts are flexible and work is still able to be reassigned and reconstructed. Ideally, companies plan more than 12 months in advance to align work and priorities to available capacity. The act of aligning capacity across delivery priorities can be clarifying, because it lets you know what sequence your portfolio needs to be delivered in, and it qualifies and clarifies risks. Capacity planning needs to a continuous exercise, as priorities can shift when planning far in advance.
Capacity planning is also vital for proper budget forecasting. To look at reliable and proportional cost estimation, capacity planning is needed to understand what ARTs, teams and organizations are needed to deliver capabilities that are planned in the coming year.
It’s important to size all required allocation, meaning the teams and roles needed for delivery. To make easier, organizations should centralize their roadmaps and capacity planning to get fast and adaptable flow. ARTs and roadmaps can be driven by well-informed product managers, but they may not be tied to the actual capacity needed to deliver these capabilities, especially when it’s supported by shared services such as compliance, audit, legal, or technology. At ProSymmetry, we commonly see release train engineers doing capacity planning in their ARTs with a spreadsheet, while other teams may be using another tool. Everyone must be utilizing the same platform to consistently align capacity planning. Otherwise, there can be a host of issues once the ART hits the PI boundary.
Tempus Resource has a variety of tools and features to facilitate resource capacity planning:
- Analyze teams across ARTs to easily identify overallocations and adjust allocations with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
- EPIC owners can see if people and teams are overallocated on other ARTs, which can pose a risk to current and future initiatives and priorities.
- From a LPM perspective, you can easily flow back and forth between allocated percentages, costs, times and story points to analyze strategic themes, epics, projects and features, and align them by costs. Teams with different velocities and those from different ARTs can be tracked on a common timeline in Tempus, making it much easier to align work across shared services and from a cost perspective.
- With Tempus’s What If Analysis, customers have an interactive modeling capability that can easily show newly introduced work and understand how it will impact production and see future overallocations and prioritize what work can be pushed to a different timeline to maximize delivery, and analyze how adding resources to a team will change allocations.
ProSymmetry, a global leader in resource portfolio management and makers of the purpose-built resource management solution Tempus Resource, has been named a Scaled Agile Platform Partner by Scaled Agile, Inc. Companies who are Scaled Agile Platform Partners have organizational expertise in delivering the Scaled Agile Framework® products and services to help customers improve business agility. Tempus brings full transparency to how resource capacity aligns with strategic delivery across an entire portfolio. Tempus enables users to leverage the best practices of SAFe® capacity planning to accelerate portfolio value flow.
To learn more about how Tempus can help with Agile delivery, visit www.youtube.com/prosymmetry. Additional reading on why resource management is important in Agile methodology can be found at https://www.prosymmetry.com/resources/why-resource-management-is-important-in-agile-methodology/.
ProSymmetry, a global leader in resource portfolio management, provides resource management solutions to large enterprises including many Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies with its proprietary platform Tempus Resource. Tempus Resource, recently named in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Adaptive Project Management and Reporting, is a purpose-built resource forecasting and capacity planning solution for strategic business decisions. With capabilities including bulk resource forecasting, skills and talent management, portfolio and resource capacity reporting and interactive scenario planning and what-if analysis, Tempus gives organizations actionable intelligence and cutting-edge analytics.
