Lego: Using Big Room Planning To Calm The Chaos
A tool to help departments manage agile at scale
Hello, and welcome to the fourth edition of the Velocity Agile newsletter! Welcome to the 5 new subscribers who have joined us since last week. If you like this newsletter, please pass it on to any friends or colleagues who might be interested. Thank you!
Kudos to Henrik Kniberg and Eik Thyrsted Brandsgård for their detailed write up of this story. Read the full white paper in the link in the references.
What happens when you have effective Scrum teams in an organisation, but chaos still reins and it doesn’t feel like the teams are pulling in the same direction? This is the scenario that many companies find themselves in, and one that LEGO did a few years ago.Â
The LEGO digital studio is a department that is responsible for interactions with customers through all devices that they own. This team saw exceptional growth to meet the demands of the more digital consumer. The department grew from 5 to 20 teams, quickly becoming a big challenge to co-ordinate.Â
Whilst Scrum was proving effective at the team level, the program level was proving a nightmare. Mechanisms to collaborate amongst teams, co-ordinate dependencies, release plan were lacking. The team were struggling to figure out how to solve this problem.
In January 2015 Henrik Kniberg, who had heavy involvement in the development of the Spotify model, became involved to try and fix the problems. They:
moved the entire organisation into a team-of-teams
introduced a shared sprint cadence
decentralized syncronization and dependency management
organised big-room planning events every 8 weeks
The biggest change they introduced was big room planning. What is big room planning? It’s a way of generating a plan for approximately 8 - 12 weeks in a single session. The most common method of this is PI planning within the Scaled Agile Framework. An example agenda from this is shown below:
The key here is that the event is split into three main sections:
Setting the scene - the session kicks off with background that ensures everyone has the same context and understands the overall vision.
Breakouts - the teams breakout and produce individual plans, with touchpoints to co-ordinate and make sure that plans are developed with other teams in mind.
Review and feedback - there is time to review the collective plan, capture risks and identify retrospective actions for next time.
So what was the outcome for Lego of implementing big room planning? According to Henrik Kniberg:
Less duplicated work. Teams are more in tune with each other, so they waste less time on redundant work.
Less dependency problems. Teams waste less time being blocked waiting for each other. Teams interact more smoothly with other departments and stakeholders.
Managers can update priorities and resolve impediments faster, because they have a better idea of what is actually going on.
Client trust has improved, because they have a better understanding of what the teams are working on and why.
Planning is easier and commitments are met more often, because the teams and portfolio planners learn how much work we can commit to and what our actual capacity is.
I would recall all of these benefits from PI planning whilst I was implementing this at retail clients. While the time and effort may seem large, the impact is outsized in terms of the speed of delivery after this. It’s something to consider for all working on large agile deliveries as a way of calming the chaos.
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References