Project Planning

Get things moving fast, by organizing work into meaningful steps that give you options, and balanced workloads.

You’ll walk away with a consistent way to plan and evaluate projects before starting, find ways to deliver in parallel without chaos, break down vague tasks into clear and small ones, and get ahead of unknowns. Plus you’ll learn how to provide feedback and interact with product requirements to make the delivery smaller steps instead of one massive never-ending project!

Good to know!

• We’re going to be a small and focused group. That means we can have high quality discussions, interactive work, and great learning outcomes.

• We have a prepared case study to work on by default, but on request we can customize the workshop to focus on a real project at your company.

• You’ll learn how to go beyond “gut feeling” planning:

  • Successfully plan a project’s delivery, including identifying how many developers you will need, and where to remove project risk

  • Interact with and challenge requirements in a constructive way that moves the project forward

  • Make work happen in parallel without creating a mess

  • Figure out how to remove risk from starting before everything is fully figured out

  • Protect the most important parts of a project’s timeline

  • Build in buffers to your project that allow for some mistakes without delaying the entire project

  • Avoid padding estimates

  • Make projects feasible to estimate (even if you don’t want to do estimates)

  • Avoid the anti-pattern of one-project-per-person as the only way to manage software development

  • Avoid constant scope creep making it look like the project isn’t progressing

• You get to keep the Miro board and take the diagrams back to your team

Up-to 8 People

Send an email to book a workshop:
Brian@BuildingBetterTeams.de

How does it work?

✅ Entirely online
⏳Only 4 hours (4 hours + 1 hour break)
🆙 Senior level and up
📝 Walk away with the skills the plan a development project
🤝 1-hour follow-up call any time in the next 30 days.

Learn to effectively organize your team

• Figure out out to make plans flexible and keep as many options open as possible.

• Get buy-in and confidence in your delivery plan from your team and your stakeholders

• Get multiple people working on a project at the same time.

• Identify what parts of a project are risky, and how to remove risk from your project

• Learn how to update the plan and let your team members take ownership over it, reducing your management overhead and increasing autonomy.

What is the planning methodology?

We’re taking the best elements of well-known frameworks and graph theory, and we simplify the entire concept to give you something that works really well for software development in startups. You get a lot of the benefits without a lot of the overhead and awkward “shifting” from a fluid conversation over to an academic planning exercise done in a soil.

“Leftward Planning” starts with a very concrete goal in mind and maps out task dependencies backwards from that goal, this ensures we use “convergent thinking” to arrive at one goal, and not “divergent thinking” to open up many possibilities. This helps fight one of the biggest challenging in planning: starting with assumptions about what to build first and trying to find your way back to the goal always leads to scope creep and confusion. Secondly, this

The second major pillar for this planning framework is to demystify how big any task is by being very specific about it. We don’t simply find out if a task is big or small, but rather if it is complicated because it is: a challenging topic, requires more learning, or is simply a high-effort task with low complexity. We constantly push to make all tasks “small”, which allows us to easily do things like resource planning and come up with good estimates of when a project can be completed.

Lastly, this methodology offers the missing link that traditionally allows technical scope creep and uncertainty to keep showing up long-term: we maintain a list of common agreements on how to approach tasks. This is by no means a silver bullet, but simply standardizing approaches will eliminates the majority of ad-hoc disagreements or growing complexity that show up (typically mid-project and early-project when everyone wants to try something new).

Your Facilitator

Brian Graham

What won’t you get?

• A highly academic explanation of CPM, CCPM, and PERT.

  • These are all great project management frameworks and inspired the planning method we will use in this course, however we are more focused on how to make the entire planning process simple and produce great results, so we simplify these models and arrange something slightly different that works really well for planning a software development project that would be typical in any tech startup.

• A tool to help you innovate

  • Project planning like this is only useful when you know the goal you need to reach. It is more useful for small software projects that require building several components and clearing out other tasks before launching a feature.

  • If you want to look at how to be more innovative and are unaware of what the final project will look like, please reach out and we can find some great partners to help you with innovation work, and how to set a “north star” for your team.

• Architecture Design

  • Often teams need to discover and design their architecture. This planning method gives you a way to create buffers for these unknown elements in your project. However, the planning method itself will not solve this problem for you if your real problem is trying to find an architecture to use.

What do you need to bring?

Because this isn’t a lecture but really an interactive workshop, we’ll need you to bring a few things with you!

• If you want to use a real project instead of our prepared example, be sure that everyone on your team already understands that project’s requirements. Even better, invite the Product Manager.

• The absolute basics of using Miro (drawing boxes, writing text, adding lines between boxes). You’ll need to draw!

• If the session is virtual, we need every participant to be on their own individual laptop. The poor sound quality and inability to participate when everyone gathers around one laptop in a conference room leads to a very poor experience for everyone.

Who should attend?

This workshop is aimed at tech teams inside startups (usually in a growth phase) with more than one team. Often we see companies want to train their Engineering managers, product managers, tech leads, and senior developers. Less senior team members are welcome to join!

This session is usually sought out to help teams who want to reduce chaos, scope-creep, and ever-growing projects. We also see teams want to use this as a tool to help them better interact with their product and business counterparts when they want to know “how long will it take?“, or “is it possible?“.

More than just a workshop!

• Unlock the skills that belong in your next performance review

  • Better planning

  • Better communication and transparency

  • On-time results and delivery, be seen as someone who keeps their delivery promises

• Interactive workshops in Miro lets every participant learn by DOING instead of just watching!

Have questions?

Just send Brian an email!:
brian@buildingbetterteams.de