Planning Poker Waste Of Time
Busy 'firefighting' (resolving internal crises) to plan ahead; 6. To view planning as a waste of time, since no product/service is made; 7. Laziness; effective planning takes time and effort; time is money; 8. Content with current success; failure to realize that success today is not a guarantee for success tomorrow; even Apple Inc. Is an example; 9. Overconfident; 10. Prior bad experience. The money invested on these books will be recovered in poker waste of time your next poker host software session. His bet is not something to be super scared of. This time, let's talk a little strategy. (STT) until I was rolled to play the double stacked $26 tournaments.
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I have a lot of good reasons to get my work done quickly:
- I work remotely, so the faster I get my tasks done, the faster I can call myworkday over;
- I’m a digital nomad, so having more time to explore means a more completeexperience of the places I’m staying;
- I’m constantly staring down a long list of things I want to work on, sogetting things done quickly allows me to tackle my passion projects withoutburning the candle at both ends.
In the past, my approach was to throw myself headlong into a new project —working furiously for as long as I could manage, hacking and slashing toward thefinish line.
These days, I slow down, take a breath, and make a plan for my work day.Then when I go hard, I go hard. And then I’m done for the day and I go tolunch.
Do You Know the Risks of Poor Planning?
Without a plan, you’re hoping. You hope you understood what your boss wanted.You hope this feature is necessary. You hope this is what the client meantby “make it pop”. You hope you’ll find a way to wrap up this articlecoherently.
Hope — for all the good it brings — is a terrible thing to rely on when you have deadlines to meet.
You don’t want to hope you’re getting it right. You want to know you’regetting it right.
Lack of Direction Can Cause Lack of Motivation
If the project isn’t explicitly laid out, it’s easy to spin your wheels or procrastinate.
There’s no clear first step, and that makes it hard to know if you’re startingthe right way.
Moving from “to do” to “in progress” is a big mental barrier, and poor planningcan make it even bigger.
Work Ends Up Wasted
If you do a bunch of work under incorrect assumptions, you’ll end up doing that work over again.
A murky understanding of a project’s end goals means you’re likely to spendeffort in the wrong areas, wasting time and energy unnecessarily.
You End Up Chasing a Moving Target
Working without planning is an excellent way to waste hours. It doesn’t meanthat you don’t plan at all, it just means you’re forced to plan at the same timeyou’re working.
In addition to the whole thing where humans are terrible at multitasking,planning on the fly means hoping that the completed work meets all therequirements — even the ones that aren’t clear yet.
Defining goals late in the production schedule almost always results in wastedor duplicated efforts, and it’s a great way to paint yourself into a deadlinecorner.
Interruptions Are Guaranteed
Whenever I work on a project where I don’t have a clear understanding of thegoals, I’m frequently forced to stop and fire off an email asking forclarification.
On a web design, I might know that I need to build a home page, but I have tostop and ask if the main focus of the home page is to highlight the newsletterlist or to drive readers to the blog. That’s vital to the project’s outcome — ifI don’t have that information beforehand, I’m hamstrung until I hear back fromthe decision makers.
The same holds true for self-directed projects: if I have to stop working to think about the strategy, I’m context switching and adding unnecessary mental fatigue.
How to Make Projects Easier, Faster, and Less Frustrating
Proper planning doesn’t need to involve hours of meetings, flowcharts, orPost-It notes. It really just boils down to defining what “success” means — inquantifiable terms — before work begins on a project.
Make the Project’s Goals Easy to Measure and Hard to Misinterpret
Imagine you’re helping prepare for a party, and the host asks, “Hey, can youorder pizza?”
In theory, that’s enough information to move forward and complete the task.
However, without more information, you’ll have to make a lot of assumptions.
For example, how many people are coming? Is anyone vegetarian or lactoseintolerant? Are we still doing the gluten-free thing? Anyone who doesn’t eatpork products?
Planning Poker Waste Of Time Table Chart
To improve, set clear goals: get enough pizza for 20 people, includingvegetarian options. Also, order cheese sticks.1
The original goal — order pizza — was hard to measure. A single slicetechnically meets the requirements. No one’s happy, but, hey! you told me toorder pizza — not pizzas — so this is clearly not my fault.
The second goal is easy to measure and has far less room for misinterpretation:were all 20 people fed? Did the vegetarians have pizza to eat? Did I get mycheese sticks?
And this is just pizza — on bigger projects, there are dozens moreclarifications needed before work starts.
Defining clear goals with easily measurable outcomes is good for everyone.For the boss or client, it provides the security of being sure the person doingthe job is fully aware of what’s required in order to call the project asuccess. This alleviates the need for micromanagement, freeing up time for othertasks.
For the person doing the work, measurable goals eliminate ambiguity. It giveswell-defined targets to shoot for, and creates simple check boxes that instantlymeasure whether or not the project is completed.
As a bonus, it requires the boss or client2 to fully considertheir idea and provide clear direction — this avoids the “I’ll know it when Isee it” dilemma by removing that option as a possible outcome.
Write Down the Goals and Post Them for Everyone on the Project
In agency speak, this is a “scope of work” — a document that details everythingexpected of everyone involved, agreed upon by everyone involved, to show thateveryone A) agrees on what “done” looks like, and B) feels confident that theyhave what they need in order to do the job well.
Write down everything required before the project is considered complete, and make sure the whole team has reviewed and approved it.
Emphasize to the decision makers that anything not on the list of goals will notbe done, so the list needs to be complete.3 Emphasize to the doersthat they need to prove that tasks are completed, so the list needs to havequantifiable tasks.
This is extremely easy to blow past in early meetings, but trust me: I’venever — never — worked on a project without a clear scope that didn’t runup against some kind of confusion, delay, tension, or (most commonly) all of theabove.
Take the time to do a thorough job on the scope, and everyone will be happier.
Make a Todo List from the Goals
After you have a clear scope, you can break a project down into a series ofyes-or-no questions that act as your project roadmap and todo list.
Going back to the pizza example, the project becomes three todo items:
- Order enough pizza to feed 20 people
- Make sure there are vegetarian options
- Order cheese sticks
This is incredibly clear, and — I hope — impossible to fuck up.
Did you order seven or eight pizzas? Yes. Check.
Did you make sure three or four don’t have meat? Yes. Check.
Did you order cheese sticks? Yes. Check.
Boom. This project is measurably complete. If this isn’t what the requesterwanted, it’s because the project was improperly defined.
This is incredibly freeing as the person doing the work: creating a todo listfrom the project goals builds a map to completion and adds an obvious indicationof progress.
The same benefits exist for clients, managers, and bosses: the project is eitherdone according to the plan or it isn’t; no micromanagement or office policingrequired.
Use Low-Cost Prototypes when Necessary
If a project is complex enough, hashing out the details may require a prototypeor working draft for review.
If work is required to flesh out an idea, keep it simple and low-cost.
At my job, we use an approach called the Shitty First Draft to allow forrapid, lo-fi creation of “real” prototypes that give the whole team a feel forhow something will work, but without any polish or unnecessary effort. We buildsomething quick and dirty, and that’s usually enough to work out the rest of thedetails.
A Few Hours of Planning Can Avoid Weeks of Wasted Time
Laying out a solid plan is vital for a project to be completed on schedule, on budget, and without unnecessary stress.
Stated more plainly, planning is not optional. I’ve ignored this advice in thepast, and it’s always proven to be a source of pain later in the process.
On the flip side, I’ve never once put together a project plan and thought later,“Dang, I sure wish I hadn’t planned so well.”
It doesn’t take much more than asking questions and writing things down. You’llspend a couple (potentially boring) hours doing it.
But you know what you’ll gain?
You’ll gain weekends of relaxation because you’re not scrambling to completea late-stage feature that has to launch Monday.
You’ll gain evenings off because you aren’t staying late after spending thewhole day in meetings trying to get guidance for features instead of working onthem.
You’ll gain camaraderie with your team and clients because there’s nomisunderstanding to cause resentment or tension.
Most importantly, you’ll gain all the benefits that come from completing projects on time, on budget, and without huge hassles or setbacks.
How Do You Plan?
Have you run up against projects where poor planning has wrought havoc? How haveyou adjusted moving forward to make things easier?
How do you plan your projects? Let me know in the comments!
- Hey! Cheese sticks weren’t on the original work order! But now that we’ve thoroughly considered the goals of the project, cheese sticks were always necessary.↩
- If you’re working on a personal project, you may think, “I don’t need to define the scope — I can figure it out as I go.” You’re not wrong, but you’re probably about to make your life a lot harder than you need to. I’m speaking from experience, here.↩
- This is especially important if you’re working with paying clients. The scope is what keeps the price where it is — if the scope changes, the price changes. Without clearly defined, measurable scopes, you’re almost guaranteed to run into scope creep, and that either means you’re working for free or your client is paying money they didn’t expect to pay — in either scenario there’s unnecessary tension and resentment.↩
What to do next.
As adults, we’re supposed to build careers, build relationships, build futures, build happiness… It’s all pretty overwhelming. It’s easy to feel stuck — like we’re on autopilot, punching a clock, and buried in tasks we don’t really care about.
Wouldn’t it be nice to get some balance back? To have extra time every day to dedicate to the things that actually matter to you?
I want to help: I’ve compiled 5 Habits of the Unfuckwithably Productive, and I want to give it to you for free. These are time-tested habits that helped me break the cycle of overwork and exhaustion; this is how I spend less than 40 hours a week on the computer — while making a living and traveling the world.
About the Author
Jason Lengstorf is a principal developer experience engineer at Netlify. He’s a frequent speaker, occasional designer, and an advocate of building better balance via efficiency. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Planning Poker Waste Of Time For
Back in 2002, in American Fork, UT, James was facilitating and XP planning meeting. The meeting stalled with the two most senior people volleying the ideas back an forth, while the others got a virtual nap. As a engineer (and consultant), James had a problem to solve. Get the meeting on track. Planning poker was born.
Download the paper.
There are many rumors about how Planning Poker started and the influence of Delphi method. I had forgotten Delphi by 2002 if I had ever know it. In those days standard equipment for an Object Mentor XP coaching gig meant having note cards. So, I had note cards. In hindsight, I think I have to thank my employer's efforts to teach us and use Total Quality Management for the insight to play the first game of Planning Poker.
In the 1980's at Teradyne, we were trying to apply TQM in engineering. One of the techniques used in brainstorming was silent grouping. First we'd all write our ideas on post-it notes, then we'd share them and group them. This way there was no polluting of each other's opinions when the most dominant or senior person spoke. I used that tool and planing poker just happened.
A lot has happened since planning poker was first played. It has become wildly popular. No there is a growing interest in No Estimates. I think estimation is still important in many development contexts. Planning Poker was way faster than other estimation techniques, but when I hear about days long planning poker meetings I cringe. I agree with the No Estimates people that that is a waste of time. Nicely though, there are faster ways to estimate that are about as accurate.