Debugging your Engineering Team Planning

Why any of this Matters
Your success as an engineering manager relies on your ability to deliver reliably. If people around you do not trust you to do that, you will not succeed. How to think about planning for an engineering team is a meaty topic I learned about the hard way. In my first role as an engineering manager, I was not new to sprint planning, but I had a fairly limited experience with several philosophies on sprint planning. During my first year leading a team, we weren’t using any particular estimation method, but... Read more...
Problem 3: Underdelivering
Maybe your team’s estimates are bang on, but they take twice as long to complete tasks as they should. How To Identify Underdelivering Give your team a performance review You might have underperforming engineers. This is not pleasant to manage. There are books on people management. I will not dig into that here other than to say: you should be doing regular check-ins on individual performance regardless of how your team is performing. Identify scope creep Scope creep happens when an existing task changes requirements. Changing requirements Are you constantly... Read more...
Problem 1: Under Accounting
Under-accounting happens when the team works on unexpected tasks. This happens a lot to teams who are responsible for a lot of technical debt, maintain a support queue, or have a lot of stakeholders asking for “quick” fixes and features. It also happens to any team being asked for any kind of work. How To Identify Under-Accounting Ask yourself: does your team routinely take on work you didn’t plan for? If the answer is ‘Yes,’ then you might be under accounting. Other forms of under-accounting include the following: Not planning... Read more...
Problem 2: Underestimating
Note: if you are under-accounting, you need to fix that before you fix underestimating. Whether estimating with Fibonacci points or in days, engineers are pretty notorious for underestimating work. How To Identify Underestimating As a manager, evaluate your team. Are you missing project milestones? “Miss” is relative to the complexity and timescale of the project or task. In a multi-month project, are you off by a few days or a few weeks? Are you missing milestones and sprint goals consistently? People make mistakes, and no one is a perfect estimator,... Read more...
How does your team plan?
It depends. A longer TL;DR answer — The use of story point estimation is situational. Not every team benefits from a process as heavy as point-based estimation. Points are used to keep a team accountable for what they are meant to deliver and their velocity for delivery. Examine Your Situation Whether or not you are using points, the question for most engineering teams is: are you delivering what is expected in the time that is expected? So my question back to my PM friend was, is your team delivering as... Read more...