The Agile PM Toolkit series - The Release Planning Wall

I have started with the The Agile PM Toolkit series with the thought of writing about tools and techniques that I have found quite helpful while PMing Projects.  I have been using most of these tools quite regularly. Some I have learned them from my fellow ThoughtWorkers and adopted in my projects while some I have derived on my own. The idea is to share these and spread the knowledge. Please provide your valuable feedback and comments. Feel free to share this with others.

The first in the series is the "Release Planning Wall". 

The Release Planning wall is an outcome of the Release Planning exercise done during inception. It helps me in planning and tracking the project on a day to day basis. With a release planning wall, I am able to identify

• Number of Parallel streams planned
• Dependency of stories in a stream and across the streams (add small post-its of different color to highlight dependency)
• Priority of features/stories planned
• How a feature is being build (each story card for a feature can be of different color)
• How are next set of Iterations planned 
• Most importantly, the Big picture view. How everything fits in together

The release planning wall is a typical grid of story cards arranged in rows and columns. The columns represents iterations and the rows represents parallel streams of work. Most often one stream is equivalent to work accomplished by a dev pair in the project. Each card represents a story. The cards can be color coded to represent specific features.

Whenever possible, I try to setup this wall just on the left of the current iteration wall. This way there is a visual indication of work that needs to be done on your left, followed by work that is currently in play on your right.

As iterations are completed the stories on the wall move from the Release wall (future iterations) to the Current iteration wall. The Release wall is a  continues planning wall and work will flow as project progresses. The wall keeps on evolving as team starts delivering. It is flexible enough to change as per business needs. The focus is to ensure that the immediate set of iterations are planned really well. The future can be planned on rough assumptions and can be hazy. Things keep getting clearer as you move ahead. 


The wall can be made a lot more visual by color coding features, adding small post-its, adding a grid etc. The above pictures has pink post-its to indicate UX dependencies and yellow post-its for data dependencies. You can get as fancy as you want.

Planning and updating the wall is a team activity and you need inputs from from your team to identify dependencies and plan the work. The BAs, Devs, UX & PM can all work together to prepare the wall. The Product Owner can define the business priorities for the planning.

This wall is a physical wall and can be replicated in tools like Jira and Mingle for remote access or distributed teams. I understand that it is duplication of work to have the wall at two places. But the benefits of having a visual indicator in front of the team is so high that I do not mind the effort of duplication and keeping the electronic wall in sync.

Update: I have written about how to facilitate a release planning session during inception here. This is the first activity post which a release plan can be used as a tracking tool.