How Capacity Planning Creates Actionable Scaled Agile Transparency

When businesses want a structure to execute a successful Agile strategy, the standard is the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) by Scaled Agile, Inc. Used by more than 20,000 businesses worldwide, its framework is very effective for scaling Agile. The SAFe framework has four core values of transparency, alignment, respect for people, and relentless improvement. In this article, we will focus on how resource capacity planning helps lay the groundwork to achieve transparency in Agile delivery.

Transparency allows you to drive timely, data-driven decisions that improve how you execute your strategy. The only way to be successful with transparency is to do capacity planning because it’s people who impact delivery, whether you are bringing work to people (an Agile concept) or people to work (the waterfall method). You need to be able to tie your people back up to the work that they are doing to track your strategic execution.

At all levels, product managers need to be able to make sure that their roadmaps are tied to resource capacity planning. If not, it can lead to product managers promoting what they want to deliver, instead of focusing on what they can actually deliver. Capacity planning is vital because:

1. The process enables you to coordinate work across ARCs, roles, shared services, and internal business partners.
2. Capacity planning helps set reasonable cost and delivery expectations with company leadership.
3. You can continuously and effectively adapt to changing business conditions because it helps you quickly understand how your team is allocated and better understand how features on one ARC can cascade downstream to other work that the team may be committed to, or how that affects costs.

By conducting effective resource capacity planning, you achieve the transparency needed to ensure you are working toward the business’s strategic goals. It’s necessary to look at a variety of factors within your organization to achieve transparency, including roles, teams, skillsets, priorities, costs, work-type mix, retention risks, skills gaps, and delivery risks. These factors are as important as being able to align the work with priorities.

Tempus Resource provides views for each type of user to help with transparency in capacity planning. These views support the following situations:

• A Release Train Engineer or Resource Manager can view each member of their team’s allocation in a single view and easily notice and correct over-allocations before major project milestones.
• A Portfolio Manager can utilize Tempus’s views of strategic themes tied to priorities or work types to see operational enhancements that are critical to cost reduction and why too many teams might be over-allocated. Tempus gives visibility across the business as to how people are planned on being deployed, whether they are in teams or not.
• Tempus can help project managers see teams from different ARCs and with different velocities, but all on a common timeline with role requests and people in a single view for better resource capacity planning. This can help when other teams’ over-allocations can impact another team’s delivery timeline. This actionable data allows leaders to have discussions earlier in the process and mitigate delivery risks before issues arise.

These concepts regarding how resource capacity planning can help with transparency in Agile delivery also apply to waterfall and hybrid delivery methodologies as well.

ProSymmetry 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.

Resource planners can learn more about how capacity planning creates actionable scaled Agile transparency, and how Tempus can help with Agile delivery at 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.