Cycle Plan
From OpenAgile
The last part of the Engagement Meeting is Planning, or the act of creating the Cycle Plan. The Cycle Plan is simply a collection of all the tasks we intend to do during the Cycle in order to deliver value. We ask questions and discuss what is required to complete each Value Driver, and we deliberately use our Reflections and Learnings to shape our understanding of the intended outcomes. A Cycle Plan should be tempered with a truthful assessment of our capacity to complete the tasks.
A Note About Perfection
The Cycle Plan is not intended to be perfect. We don't have to follow it rigidly, which in most types of work would lead to disaster. The Cycle Plan is meant to be flexible. One of the key ways in which it is flexible is that we do not decide who will do what task at the start of the Cycle. Instead, we decide as we go. As the team works, tasks are completed, modified, new ones are added to the Cycle Plan, shared, or deleted. Generating Tasks
In the Engagement Meeting, everyone participating in the work of the Cycle needs to actively participate in generating tasks. This creates collective ownership of the Cycle Plan. Generating tasks can be done in a discussion format or with people working individually and then coming together at the end of the meeting. Generally, any item in the list of Value Drivers can become many tasks. For example, if one of the Value Drivers is to have a meeting with a potential client, then this single item might result in three tasks: confirm the meeting, prepare the agenda, and then hold the actual meeting. The way Value Drivers become tasks is entirely up to the people involved in doing the work. People who will not be working during the Cycle do not have a say in defining the tasks in the Cycle Plan.
Commitment to the Cycle Plan
Everyone needs to participate in making a commitment to the work of the Cycle. This can be done in a number of ways, but in OpenAgile we focus on the idea of being truthful about our capacity. Deliberately over-committing is strongly discouraged. Instead, we carefully look at the quantity and quality of the tasks in our Cycle Plan. By considering everything together, we can learn to make reasonable commitments to our team members. There are many advanced techniques for measuring capacity and estimating the amount of work in a Cycle Plan. However, the simplest approach, and the one that we normally start with, is to have consensus agreement: everyone in the group must fully agree to commit to the whole Cycle Plan. If anyone is uncertain, then remove some work from the Cycle Plan until everyone is certain. By the end of the Engagement Meeting, everyone involved in doing the work of the Cycle should be fully committed to finishing all the tasks in the Cycle Plan.
Once we have a Cycle Plan that we are committed to, then we take Action.
