From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Project release planning

From the course: Business Analysis Foundations

Project release planning

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- All the hard work on the project culminates in the release. Now, when I say release, I mean the product, service, result, or solution you're delivering to the client. The release is the what and the when, what you're delivering and when it is to be delivered. It's the end of the development work, the piece of work that has been accepted. Since this is such an important moment, it makes sense that we take time to plan for it. Release planning begins long before you're about ready to deliver the result. In fact, you could say that it starts with the design of the roadmap. When you lay out your roadmap, you're deciding on a very high level what will be delivered when. You take these milestones to form a rough draft of the order of your releases. The schedule and choice of releases will determine how the achievement of those releases are accomplished. It affects the selection of user stories, and the more detailed planning of sprints. So it's important to understand the vision of the final product. Ask yourself, can the result be delivered in stages? If so, which stages can be delivered first? Also, you'll want to consider your receiver. You could have a group that just asked for a change. Maybe accounts payable wants to do it in a new way. Or maybe it's an organizational strategy, such as moving things to the cloud. The nature of the audience will affect how we release things. For example, say you want to start selling your products to people in France by the first of next year. Then, your release planning would have to prioritize which changes come first and which are the most important. So you have to ask, what does selling in France look like? Is it all online? Do we have to have an office there? Do we have a completely new branding and a new site? What about GDPR? Do we comply? You can't release everything at once. We have to create a hierarchy of requirements that are prioritized according to feasibility and value. The requirements get chunked into releases. The items in the planned release are then prioritized by the stakeholder and the team. This is where sprint planning starts. If release planning sounds like high-level sprint planning, you'd be right, it's very similar. Sprint planning is more concrete at a lower level and time-boxed. Regardless of whether you're doing a release or sprint, prioritization is the most important part of the process. I'll leave you with a common analogy about priorities. You have a jar and some rocks. You need to fill the jar. You have big rocks, small rocks, and sand. If you put the sand in first and then the small rocks, you probably won't have room for the big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, then the small rocks, and then the sand, it's more than likely that you'll have room for everything. That's what we want to do with our planning. We want to make sure the big rocks get in the jar first. The big rocks are those high priority requirements. The small rocks and sand, lower priority. So bottom line, put the big rocks in first.

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