Visual Milestone Planning in a Hybrid Development Context

TL;DR

This paper introduces Visual Milestone Planning (VMP), a visual and collaborative method designed to integrate agile practices into hybrid development processes through a novel planning matrix and interactive scheduling tools.

Contribution

The paper presents a new VMP approach that uses visual tools and a milestone planning matrix to enhance planning and collaboration in hybrid development environments.

Findings

VMP promotes shared understanding and commitment among team members.

The milestone planning matrix effectively allocates backlog items to milestones.

Scheduling with a Tetris-like canvas improves planning flexibility.

Abstract

This paper explains the Visual Milestone Planning (VMP) method using an agile vocabulary to facilitate its adoption by agile practitioners as a front end for a hybrid development process. VMP is a visual and collaborative planning approach which promotes a shared understanding of the work approach and commitment through the direct manipulation by team members of the reified planning constructs involved in the development of the plan. Once the product backlog has been established and relevant milestones identified, a novel construct called the milestone planning matrix is used to document the allocation of product backlog items to milestones. The milestones due dates are later determined by grouping sticky notes representing the work to be performed into time-boxes called work packages and accommodating them on a resource and time scaled scheduling canvas very much as it would be done in a Tetris game.