Before knowing how to do capacity planning in Agile, it would be good to start by gaining a basic understanding of what Agile Capacity Planning is.
What is Agile Capacity Planning?
In the Agile Planning Process, you will come across the term Agile Capacity Planning. This is where the capacity of the Agile team is evaluated. With capacity planning, it will be possible for your team to understand the quantity of productive engineering time in a Sprint.
For instance, when you intend to find out how to do capacity planning in Agile, you must collect details about the availability of each member of the Agile team. You should also know when they will not be available. After gathering this information, you will have to add up the number of individuals to evaluate the overall team capacity. Further, you should take into consideration different aspects to assess capacity. These aspects include competing priorities, the standard number of work hours in a day, any backlog items to be completed and the Sprint duration. When you have capacity planning done properly, it will be possible for your team to confidently assure the constructive work within the Sprint.
When to Do Capacity Planning in Agile?
Before you learn how to do capacity planning in Agile, it is better to learn when to do it. When you have a Scrum Master in your team, you can identify the capacity of your team before the Sprint Planning. For a particular Sprint, the ideal time for capacity planning is just prior to the Sprint Planning. When you do this, your team can get better visibility of the availability and vacation plan of your resources.
Let us consider that your teams have an Application Lifecycle Management Tool. With this tool, each team in your organization can update its available time. With this move from each team, it will be possible for the Scrum Master to aid every team to understand how to evaluate their individual capacity.
Before the Sprint Planning instigates, the Scrum Master can call teams for a quick meeting for a duration of around 30 minutes to get the capacity calculated and updated accordingly. With some initial help from the Scrum Master, teams can do it on their own quickly.
How to Do Agile Capacity Planning?
Now, you know when to do capacity planning in Agile. But, you are here to learn how to do capacity planning in Agile. Let us find out here:
Fundamental Equation:
The fundamental equation is that you should multiply the number of team members by the number of days in the Sprint. Again, you should multiply the resulting figure by the number of productive hours in a day. In most instances, in the capacity planning equation, more complex parameters are considered. However, this method of calculation will work only for organizations with well-organized teams that have achieved speeds in story points consistently per Sprint. Just in case, a team member is not available for some or all Sprints, additional parameters should be considered.
How to Plan A Sprint?
As you intend to find an answer to the question of how to do capacity planning in Agile, you should understand that Sprint Planning is crucial when judging capacity. So, it is better to learn how to plan a Sprint.
At the time of Sprint Planning, Scrum Teams generally face difficulties caused by Sprint commitments. They have questions like how to plan for the team’s capacity and how to commit to a particular Sprint.
The best idea here is to do commitment-driven planning at the early stages of adopting Scrum. Only when you are aware of the present team capacity, you can commit to a Sprint goal. So, how to know the team capacity? You can know this number from the number of people available in the particular Sprint.
Let us consider that your team has 7 people. Also, we can take the Sprint time to be two weeks, which means 10 working days. Further, considering that your team will work for 8 hours per day, the total hours will be 7 x 8 x 10 = 560 hours. It will be hard to plan for this entire capacity. Even when you do this, your team will have to work overtime. Above all, they will have to rush when it nears the end of the 10-day period. In turn, the team’s morale and work quality will reduce. So, here comes the question of what is the team’s capacity to commit? Even, you might question how to effectively carry out the Sprint Planning?
You can consider using Focus Factor. With this concept, you can calculate the original capacity for Sprint forecasting and commitment. This factor will generally lie somewhere between 0.6 and 0.8.
What is Focus Factor?
Project Managers have been using this concept for a long time. It is where they use 6 to 6.5 hours in a working day for the execution of a project. The focus factor is nothing but the ability of the team to stay focused on the goals of the Sprint without any distractions. After you arrive at the total capacity of 560 hours in the method stated above, you should multiply it by the focus factor. In turn, you can get the real capacity. Based on this capacity, you can make Sprint forecasting and commitments.
In the example above, the effective hours of working that you can expect from your team after applying the focus factor should be calculated as 560 x 0.6, which is equal to 336 hours. This is the time that your team can take up in the present Sprint.
Motivate your team to work on tasks that are of top priorities from backlog with the guidance of the Product Owner. Once the stories with top priorities are identified, it is better to split those stories into tasks. Also, each task should be estimated for hours. Now, your team will work on the stories until all the tasks combine for 336 hours in this case.
How to Perform Capacity Planning?
Here are some tips that will help you with finding the answer to your question of how to do capacity planning in Agile:
Evaluate the Probable Capacity Needs:
You can judge the capability of a department either from its output or input. With capacity forecasting, it will be possible to identify the variation between expected and actual capacity. In turn, necessary adjustments can be made accordingly.
By estimating the demand for a product at different stages, you can judge the capacity requirements for a shorter period. Due to technological and demand uncertainties, it is generally hard to forecast long-term capacity needs.
Judge the Present Capacity and Infrastructure Facilities:
What you are planning for should be decided before you begin your capacity planning. It is better to have a clear idea of the tasks that your department should complete. Not only now but also you should identify the tasks to complete in the future. In this stage, do consider the projects that are in pipeline and the events that are coming up in the next three to six months. Then, it is better to begin judging the duration of each task. You can do this by dividing every project down into individual tasks. When you do this, you can judge the time required for each with ease.
Spot Alternatives to Requirements:
When you spot alternatives to requirements, it is important to choose only alternatives that can work. For instance, during capacity planning, you find that the present capacity is not sufficient to complete the priority tasks. So, you know that to address the shortage, you will have to expand the team. To boost capacity, you might need overtime and additional shift as well. But, the thing to remember here is that expansion will need additional investment. Even, it might carry a risk of falling short of expectations coming up in the future.
Keep the Financial Reports Ready:
When you decide to expand or reduce the team size, you should arrive at this decision considering technological and financial perspectives as well. At the time of assessment, you should look at the reaction of workers and locals when obtaining reports from them. The most common evaluation techniques that can work here are decision trees, queuing theory and cost-benefit analysis.
Evaluate Key Qualitative Problems:
When you do capacity planning, you should remember one thing for sure. When the actual capacity goes beyond the capacity planned, you should take steps to reduce the excess capacity. To achieve it, you will have to lay off some workers, sell existing facilities and even you might be forced to develop a new product. Even, at times, you will have to take additional jobs from other sources so that you can stay ahead.
Conclusion
Capacity Planning in Agile methodology will help your organization in many ways. For instance, it will help with easily identifying skill gaps. Even, it will help with keeping track of the skillset of your team. So, do it right and you can reap the benefits in the future.
