The Planning Game

Audience

Whole Team

Our plans take advantage of both business and development expertise.

You may know what you want to release, but how do you actually construct a step-by-step plan? That’s where the planning game comes in.

Despite the name, the planning game isn’t a trivial piece of entertainment. In economics, a “game” refers to a situation where “players select actions and the payoff depends on the actions of all players.”¹ That’s what the planning game is. It’s a cooperative game designed to create the best possible payoff.

¹This definition of “game” comes from Deardoff’s Glossary of International Economics.

The planning game is notable for the way it maximizes the amount of information contributed to your plan. It’s strikingly effective. Although the planning game has limitations, if you work within them, I know of no better way to decide the details of your plan.

Allies

Stories

Purpose

Visual Planning

The planning game is just one part of your overall planning process. It’s a way of breaking valuable, releasable increments into smaller stories. At the end of the planning game, you’ll have a set of stories that are “just right” for development. To recap:

1. Purpose provides the overall goal and current direction.

2. Visual Planning identifies options for valuable increments.

3. The Planning Game provides the step-by-step plan you’ll use to develop each increment.

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In this Section

1. The Planning Game
   1. Cargo Cult: Planning Day
   2. How to Play
      1. 1. Customers decide the scope of the plan
      2. 2. The whole team brainstorms stories
      3. 3. Developers size the stories
      4. 4. Customers prioritize the stories
      5. 5. Repeat until the plan is complete
   3. Keep Your Options Open
   4. How to Win the Planning Game
   5. Prioritizing Development Decisions
   6. Facing Reality
   7. Iterating the Planning Game
   8. Questions
   9. Prerequisites
   10. Indicators
   11. Alternatives and Experiments