Planning Poker Waste Of Time

Lots of executives, small business owners, and managers talk about the importance of strategic planning. But usually, that's a terrible, terrible idea.

1. Planning Poker Waste Of Time Table Chart
2. Planning Poker Waste Of Time For
3. Planning Poker Cards

Let's get really clear, really quickly:

1. Yes, you should definitely plan ahead.
2. Yes, you should think strategically.
3. But, you're probably so bad at day-to-day operations that strategic planning is a bad idea.
4. And even if you've done 'strategic planning' in the past, it likely had no effect.

Home / Poker Waste Of Time. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person. If you cannot find the Game or Configuration you're looking for, please contact your Sales Representative or Gaming Support to submit a support request.Organize challenges with other members. Pay, there is an announcement for the mega progressive state wide super times pay. Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development.In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud. Here's what you can do from now on to stop wasting time: 1. Have a Plan for the Day. The biggest time waste is not having any kind of plan for the day or week. When we don't have a plan for the day, we just drift through the day reacting to anything that comes our way and not making any progress towards our goals or purpose. For the second room, you have to spend more time covering the windows, making sure that you paint the corners and edges properly and so on. Do you see the difference? That is the complexity of the task. Planning Poker is what we call a fun, playful way to estimate User Stories. Planning Poker ® (sometimes called Scrum poker) is a simple but powerful tool that makes team-estimating faster, more accurate, and more fun. The term was coined by James Grenning and popularized by Mike Cohn. It would be a waste of time to discuss whether the story is 19, 20, or 22.5. It is simply a big story, and a 20 will reflect that.

Yeah, brutal stuff. So what gives?

A piece from the SmartDraw Blog includes two choice quotes:

Most businesses don't do any strategic planning. And, of the ones who do, most treat it as nothing more than an academic exercise.

If you've got a document on a shelf somewhere that was written after an enormous number of meetings but never cracked again, this is all too familiar.

The post also notes:

Strategy requires much more than extrapolating a budget. It requires an open, honest examination of the toughest issues the organization faces. Tough questions have to be asked. Warts may need to be exposed. This can be difficult. It can be uncomfortable. It requires leadership and decision-making. It may require risk. That takes guts.

This is also antithetical to many organizations. Being open and honest is only possible if people are more committed to the truth and their ethics than they are to their jobs. Finding problems means admitting weakness. And lastly, it's not like being decisive is all that common.

Time for some more attacks on strategic planning. Bain Capital explains that 97% of strategic planning is a waste for eight reasons. Here are three especially good ones:

1. They don't really focus on strategy. Most of these processes have become conversations about budgets and resource allocation, not strategy

4. They don't connect strategy to frontline routines or behaviors. The planning process is typically a long, drawn-out conversation among staff members.

7. They end up becoming numbers-driven abstractions. To be very clear, there is nothing wrong with numbers; good strategies must be tied directly to financial outcomes. But if strategic planning doesn't talk about strategy, if it doesn't allocate resources effectively, if it doesn't connect to the front line or integrate decisions on talent, then what is it?

I'm not even going to quote from the Harvard Business Review piece The Big Lie of Strategic Planning. Because really, you should click on that link and just read the whole thing.

Unless Your Tactics Are Amazing, You're Not Ready for Strategy

We'll get to definitions in a minute. Strategy is large-scale, tactics are small-scale. Is your company absolutely killing it with everyday tasks? Do you deliver consistent, high-quality goods and services every time? Are you measuring your activity and making constant adjustments? Are routine tasks well-defined and sufficiently documented? Does every team member know what they are supposed to be doing at all times?

Probably not. And if not, that's where you should focus first.

Planning Poker Waste Of Time Table Chart

Being Good at Operations Doesn't Mean You're Good at Planning

Doing something you've done before a dozen or a hundred times is expertise. Preparing to do something which is likely going to have new or unexpected elements is planning. It's difficult to plan well. Your predictions are likely to be wrong; sometimes wildly so. By definition, you won't have accounted for possibilities that you failed to anticipate.

And if you're actually pretty good at planning?

You Probably Don't Know What 'Strategy' Is Anyway

Here's a great definition from Harvard professor Michael D. Watkins with some emphasis added:

A business strategy is a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making

In short: strategy is not 'what we're going to do' but 'how we intend to think.' That means a strategic plan is really more about finding a way to get everyone to make the same kinds of decisions given a particular set of circumstances.

Which isn't what you were thinking, right? And that's why you probably shouldn't be doing any strategic planning. Instead, you likely need to figure out why there are four emails and two phone calls for absolutely typical customer requests.

Yes, Tactics Are Hard

If you've ever struggled to keep a house clean, you know that normal, everyday stuff can be extremely challenging. A business is supposed to deliver to customers over and over again, virtually without fail. Until you're able to do the fundamentals exceptional well, there's no need to discuss strategic planning.

So…I guess it's back to work now, right?

@robbyslaughter

• Appreciation is Good. Action is Almost Always Better. - Friday, September 4, 2020
• Strategic Planning Is A Waste Of Time (Except When It Isn't) - Tuesday, December 3, 2019
• Managers and Employees Should Not Be Friends - Monday, November 25, 2019

Buy Planning Poker^® decks:

Estimating is one of the supporting activities in Scrum and other agile processes. This means the process of assessing the size of a story, i.e. how long it will take, how much work it is to implement, how expensive it is, or however you want to put it. In Scrum, estimating is a team activity. For each story, the whole team participates in the estimation process. Planning Poker^® (sometimes called Scrum poker) is a simple but powerful tool that makes team-estimating faster, more accurate, and more fun. The term was coined by James Grenning and popularized by Mike Cohn.

Estimating without Planning Poker

Here's a typical problem with team estimates. Let's say we are in a sprint planning meeting and the Product Owner says:

So the team starts thinking about how long the story will take (in ideal man-days in this case)….

Mr A believes that he knows exactly what needs to be done, so he thinks this will take 3 days. Mrs B and C are more pessimistic. Mr D and E are slacking off. So Mr A says '3 days'.

This makes B and C confused. They start doubting their own estimates. Mr E wakes up and doesn't really know what is being estimated. D is still dozing.The product owner asks for the rest of the team's estimates.

A business strategy is a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making

In short: strategy is not 'what we're going to do' but 'how we intend to think.' That means a strategic plan is really more about finding a way to get everyone to make the same kinds of decisions given a particular set of circumstances.

Which isn't what you were thinking, right? And that's why you probably shouldn't be doing any strategic planning. Instead, you likely need to figure out why there are four emails and two phone calls for absolutely typical customer requests.

Yes, Tactics Are Hard

If you've ever struggled to keep a house clean, you know that normal, everyday stuff can be extremely challenging. A business is supposed to deliver to customers over and over again, virtually without fail. Until you're able to do the fundamentals exceptional well, there's no need to discuss strategic planning.

So…I guess it's back to work now, right?

@robbyslaughter

• Appreciation is Good. Action is Almost Always Better. - Friday, September 4, 2020
• Strategic Planning Is A Waste Of Time (Except When It Isn't) - Tuesday, December 3, 2019
• Managers and Employees Should Not Be Friends - Monday, November 25, 2019

Buy Planning Poker^® decks:

Estimating is one of the supporting activities in Scrum and other agile processes. This means the process of assessing the size of a story, i.e. how long it will take, how much work it is to implement, how expensive it is, or however you want to put it. In Scrum, estimating is a team activity. For each story, the whole team participates in the estimation process. Planning Poker^® (sometimes called Scrum poker) is a simple but powerful tool that makes team-estimating faster, more accurate, and more fun. The term was coined by James Grenning and popularized by Mike Cohn.

Estimating without Planning Poker

Here's a typical problem with team estimates. Let's say we are in a sprint planning meeting and the Product Owner says:

So the team starts thinking about how long the story will take (in ideal man-days in this case)….

Mr A believes that he knows exactly what needs to be done, so he thinks this will take 3 days. Mrs B and C are more pessimistic. Mr D and E are slacking off. So Mr A says '3 days'.

This makes B and C confused. They start doubting their own estimates. Mr E wakes up and doesn't really know what is being estimated. D is still dozing.The product owner asks for the rest of the team's estimates.

As you can see, the rest of the team has been heavily influenced by A, just because A spoke up first. This is very risky! Both B and C thought it would take significantly longer than 3 days, their doubts should be aired!

Estimating with Planning Poker

Now imagine that each team member is holding a deck of cards, containing the following cards:

Let's redo the estimation. The product owner says:

Once again, the team starts thinking about how long the story will take.

This time nobody blurts anything out. Instead they all have to present a card, face down, containing their estimate. Everybody has to present a card, so Mr D and E wake up. Mr D admits that he was sleeping and asks what the story is about. It's harder to slack off when doing estimates this way :o) When they are done, all cards are turned over simultaneously, revealing everyone's estimates.

Whoops! Big divergence here. The team, in particular Mr A and Mrs C, need to discuss this story and why their estimates are so wildly different. After some discussion, Mr A realizes that he has forgotten some important tasks that need to be included in the story. Mrs C realizes that, with the design that Mr A presented, the story might be smaller than 20. After the discussion (3 minutes in total) they do another estimation round for that same story.

Convergence! OK, not complete convergence. But they agree that an estimate of 5 should be close enough. Next story.

Why the strange number series?

The higher numbers have less granularity. Why? Why is there no 21 for example? Several reasons:

• Speed up the estimation process by limiting the number of choices (i.e. number of cards).
• Avoid a false sense of accuracy for high estimates.
• Encourage the team to split large stories into smaller ones.

A high estimate (> 20 for example) usually means that the story is not well understood in detail. It would be a waste of time to discuss whether the story is 19, 20, or 22.5. It is simply a big story, and a 20 will reflect that. If you want to get into detail, break the story down into several smaller stories. Smaller stories can be estimated in greater detail.

Special cards

How do I get a hold of Planning Poker decks?

Planning Poker Waste Of Time For

We sell Planning Poker decks online, just press the link below.

The coffee cup card was our addition to the default series :o)

Planning Poker Cards

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