Adaptive Planning

The Two of Chalks card means that you need to look ahead and plan. You are beginning to realize your objectives and long-term goals. You need to take advantage of your ideas and make them into an actual plan. It signifies how discovery reflection, preparation, control, create insight and advantage.

To work across the whole scope of the project, you need to develop a cross functional workflow, with multidisciplinary teams. In order to work efficiently your planning process need to be able to adapt. Planning in too much detail can be wasteful because you will discover details that change the work. So you define a high level roadmap of stories to be developed during a release, and plan for the next iterations. Usually mapping epics, that can be broken down into more detailed individual stories.

The multidisciplinary team understand the customer’s needs, the business wants and the technical constraints. At three months out, where everything is uncertain, you are conducting research and gathering information, whilst also developing high level rules and principles. As you refine the requirements you have discovered they generate goal based user stories, which can be described as epics. Finally as you plan your sprint these epics break out into individual user stories.