This post cross-published with OnePublish

What is BattlePlan?

Managing commitments with tight deadlines can be challenging, especially when dealing with messy backlogs. That's where BattlePlan comes in. It streamlines the process by narrowing the focus on specific releases that require fast planning, development, and release.

💡Story behind the idea

I was in a situation where our team needed to fulfil several commitments and resolve technical debts within a short timeframe. All of them are of high priority, but they involve different contexts.

The development team negotiated the deadline and capacity with the project manager. However, sometimes business-level management leaves the team with no other options and at this point, both sides are stuck.

❓Which agile method fits more to this situation?

Working with sprints - The team discusses the problems with PM and creates tickets based on the PM’s requirements and needs to estimate the tickets which could lead to arguing over decisions and deadlines. Usually, it leads nowhere and the same topic recursively goes around and leaves everyone blocked.

Working with Kanban - This is not even considered as an option when the team is racing against time. Adding them as tasks to the current backlog could make it even more challenging to track progress and potentially lead to missing some of the parts.

🎯Solution with BattlePlan

Think of BattlePlan as an emergency tool that allows you to leave the current board behind and focus specifically on given requirements within a certain period of time.

1. Requirements need to be properly discussed internally and also with stakeholders to gain more insight into what needs to be done and potentially reduce unnecessary work. BattlePlan template includes section for gathering feedback per sessions and keep them organised.

2. Once the feedback and ideas have been discussed, the team needs to handle tasking. This involves creating tickets under specific releases. Release is a collection of tickets that are related to a specific goal or feature. It helps in organizing and tracking the progress of the tasks.

3. Split the team into squads (minimum group of 2 people) and assign releases to each squad. Each squad should have a clear understanding of their assigned release and work collaboratively to achieve the milestones set for them.

BattlePlan has ready-to-use task templates that help assignees fully understand the context and goal. Each task has a man-day property to estimate the time required to complete it. This allows the team to effectively allocate their time and prioritize tasks based on their urgency.

🧪 Other use cases of BattlePlan

The BattlePlan is not limited to such situations. You can also use it for NCTs (Narrative, Commitments, Tasks) to properly organize ideas and feedback, and track the progress.

It's Free

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Don't let deadlines ruin your day.