By Robert
Have you and your team ever found yourselves in these scenarios?
- Misjudging the complexity of a project.
- Holding differing views on which tasks take precedence.
- Miscalculating how much time specific tasks will take.
All these situations lead to panic before deadlines, creating stress and long work hours.
Planning Poker is a simple yet extremely effective tool. It might help you leverage a force that prevents the situations described above: the collective intelligence of your team.
Especially in the context of research and science, where projects and planning often come with a high degree of uncertainty, Planning Poker offers a structured yet flexible approach to forecasting.
It encourages you and your team to articulate and confront your assumptions, leading to a more informed and robust project planning. It is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimation, originally developed to assess the effort or relative size of tasks in software development.
However, my application of this technique spans wider. Essentially, I turn to Planning Poker whenever there’s a need to make predictions under considerable uncertainty. I’ll explain this with examples shortly.
But first, let’s explore the mechanics of Planning Poker. Picture you and your team setting out to gauge the time needed for particular subtasks within a project.
The Set-up
- Required Material: You need a set of Planning Poker cards for each participant. You can order these, easily make them yourself in 5 minutes, or simply use an online version. For this, you just need to browse for “planning poker online” and you will find plenty of offers. These sets contain cards with numerical values in ascending order. The choice of sequence depends on personal preference and requirements. I regularly use the (admittedly somewhat nerdy) original set-up. Each card receives a number from the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). I also always use an abstract scale. So, I try not to assign a specific measure (working days or hours to the effort), but keep it abstract, e.g. effort 21 = enormous, effort 1= minimal, effort 5=moderate).
- Participants: All team members should participate. If you have a project where you collaborate with others, include your collaborators as well.
- Clarity: All participants should have clarity about the task. “Prioritize these tasks…” “Estimate the effort for X, Y, …”
The Estimation Process
- Individual Estimation: Team members individually pick a card reflecting their effort estimation for the subtask. This step is performed privately to prevent swaying others’ estimates.
- Discussion: Following individual estimation, all team members reveal their cards simultaneously. If there is a significant difference in the estimates- and there often will be, the team discusses the rationale behind each person’s estimation. The estimators with the highest and lowest values typically explain why they estimated the way they did. Experience has taught me the efficiency of time-limited debates. Allowing 1-2 minutes for gathering all perspectives is usually ample.
- Repeated Estimation: After discussing, another round of estimation takes place, aiming to converge to a consensus estimate. This process repeats until the team reaches a general agreement. You might wonder what happens if no approximate consensus is reached? I don’t know either, because in the 1 zillion times I’ve “played” Planning Poker, it hasn’t happened yet. The process is repeated for every point that requires an estimate, until all points have been discussed and estimated.
The Benefits
Through this method, the team gains a deeper insight into the project, fostering a common understanding and commitment to the project goals. The consensus on the final estimate typically strikes a careful equilibrium between hopeful ambition and prudent caution.
By following this approach, you encourage the participation of all team or project members in discussions. This inclusivity leads to more precise estimations and a richer comprehension of the work ahead. It creates a supportive atmosphere where even the most reserved team members, including those new to the team or naturally introverted, feel welcomed to share their input. This ensures that every voice is heard and considered, thereby optimally but efficiently leveraging the team’s collective wisdom.
Furthermore, it effectively dismantles the tendencies toward bias and top-down decision-making, all the while enhancing team collaboration and mutual respect. As team members exchange ideas and expertise, a robust foundation of shared understanding is built.
Planning Poker revitalizes what might otherwise be seen as the mundane task of “project planning,” elevating it to a dynamic strategizing session. The dialogue that emerges in this context is laden with insights. Team members start into discussions about task complexities, interdependencies, and potential challenges. These conversations not only refine the project’s schedule but also serve as a repository of experience for all team members in future projects.
Further application scenarios
Let me share the examples I hinted at earlier about how I apply Planning Poker beyond the basic project planning.
- Prioritization: I have worked as a process consultant. As such, it was my job to analyze processes and identify opportunities for enhancement. I pretty often came up with an extensive list of potential measures for process improvement along with the participants. However, since not everything can be done at once, priorities must be set in which order to proceed. The perfect opportunity for a round of Planning Poker with the project team of the process participants. It not only saved me from the extensive task of analyzing (impact vs. effort) but also harnessed the process participants’ insights for proper prioritization. Furthermore, the dialogue generated through this method provided solid arguments for the proposed sequence of measures when presenting to the management board and secured the process participants’ commitment to the implementation.
- Stakeholder Management: In the beginning of a project, one of my first actions is to clarify and recognize who the stakeholders are and to make an assessment as to whether they are likely to be supportive (advocates) or opposed (opponents) to the project. Time to play Planning Poker again. I lean on the project team’s familiarity with stakeholders, particularly valuable when my direct interaction with individual stakeholders is limited. This approach efficiently uses the team’s collective experience to forecast stakeholder positions.
The potential applications of Planning Poker are boundless. To spark more ideas, consider that you and your team could also estimate:
- The level of scientific innovation of a new research initiative,
- The time and effort required for team members to acclimate to a new project or technology,
- The risks linked to various project decisions,
- The degree of team cohesion and collaboration for an impending project or any other aspect that requires a collective judgment.
I have to buy a new deck of cards every year because it gets worn out. What do you estimate next?
– Robert