How does Planning Poker work?

How many hours does it take you to do a complicated task? One of those tasks that you’ve never done before, that involves a mountain of creativity and still lacks your reference point? You tell me. Ten hours? Twenty hours? A hundred hours, can you possibly make it through that? Specifically estimating how long you will be working on something becomes increasingly difficult when the complexity and uncertainty of a task is high. In this article you will discover how Planning Poker can help you, how to estimate relatively and what to do when management asks you for detailed time sheets. And when do you actually choose Planning Poker over those timesheets?

When not to choose Planning Poker?

First, let’s agree on when not to choose Planning Poker. Or let’s put it this way; when regular timesheets might work just as well as Planning Poker. For performing the less complex tasks, you can often still get by just fine with your timesheet. This is equally true for tasks that you have already done six hundred times, you can then simply make a much better estimate of the hours commitment based on experience. For example, an estimate of how long it will take to get the month’s invoices out the door and register training participants. We can estimate that reasonably well with a timesheet. But when do you choose Planning Poker with your team?

When do you choose Planning Poker?

So we know when Planning Poker might be less relevant. But when is Planning Poker relevant? Well, for example, when developing a completely new service or product. You and your team have probably already done that a few times, but the complexity and uncertainty in this task is many times greater. And with that, of course, the concrete hours of effort is also much harder to estimate. For yourself. And certainly as a team.

What is Planning Poker?

Sharp, we indeed overlooked that question; what is Planning Poker? The answer: Planning Poker is a method within Agile, where you work with your team members to estimate the effort for tasks. And you do that using playing cards, this way you can assign relative sizes to different tasks. Through lively discussions and democratic voting in the team, everyone on your team contributes to determining the complexity of the work. Planning Poker promotes collective intelligence and reduces individual bias, which in turn leads to accurate estimates and a closer team dynamic. So you could say that Planning Poker is not just about assigning numbers, but also about collaboration, understanding and fostering successful Agile projects.

Planning Poker incrementally

This is how Planning Poker works incrementally:

Preparation:

The Product Owner presents the portion of the Product Backlog that he/she expects to work on. And thus what work needs to be estimated. Helpful tools here are the User Stories.
These tasks should be clear and understandable to the team.

Card sets:

Each participant is given a set of cards with values representing the effort or complexity of the task.
For example, these cards can be Fibonacci numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.) or t-shirt sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL).

Presentation of work:

The Product Owner presents the work piece by piece to the team.
Any questions about the task are answered to ensure that everyone has a good understanding of what is being asked.

Card selection:

Each team member selects a card from the set that corresponds for him/her to the estimate of effort for that particular task.
This is often done without consulting other team members in order to avoid the influence of others.

Cards reveal:

After all team members have chosen their cards, they are simultaneously turned over and revealed to the entire team.

Discussion and Consensus:

If there are large differences between the estimates, a discussion follows to understand the reasoning behind each estimate.
The goal is to reach consensus on an estimate that is representative of input from the entire team.

Repeat for each task:

This process is repeated for each task on the list.
The goal is to estimate the entire list of tasks before the team moves on to the next phase of the project.

Through this structured approach, Planning Poker helps your team(s) make realistic and accurate estimates. And so you can get started on the effective planning and execution of your Agile projects.

Why the Fibonacci sequence in Planning Poker?

The Fibonacci sequence is often used in Planning Poker for several reasons:

Nonlinear growth: The Fibonacci sequence has nonlinear growth, meaning that the differences between successive numbers increase as the sequence progresses. This helps highlight uncertainty and increasing risk when estimating larger tasks.
Reducing detail: By using numbers from the Fibonacci series, team members are forced to make larger jumps between estimate values. This helps prevent them from spending too much time accurately specifying small differences in effort between tasks.
Subjective perception: People tend to make subjective assessments of complexity. The nonlinear nature of the Fibonacci sequence reflects this subjectivity and allows for different interpretations of task complexity.
Reducing the tendency to round off: Using the Fibonacci series also helps reduce the tendency of team members to round their estimates to the nearest round number, which can result in less accurate estimates.

In general, the Fibonacci sequence in Planning Poker helps promote more realistic and less biased estimates. And so? So you and your team(s) can plan and prioritize better .

What do you do when management doesn’t want Planning Poker?

When you switch to relative estimation with Planning Poker, this way of getting a grip on your work may not fit with the way things are going in the organization now. Management may then be reluctant to use Planning Poker. That is why it is useful not to just start with Planning Poker, but to get on the same page with management first. Discuss why the detailed timesheet doesn’t work for your type of work. And explain why you can paint a much more realistic picture of the state of affairs with the relative estimate.

In addition, it is good to know the reason from within the organization for reporting and timekeeping. Is it for grip, (mis)confidence, micromanagement, legislation? Whatever it may be, there must be a reason for it. And based on that, you may also be able to connect to the real need with Planning Poker.

Can you combine Planning Poker and timekeeping?

The short answer: we’re really not a fan of it. So as far as we’re concerned, don’t turn Planning Poker points into hourly estimates. Because if we do, we are perpetuating an old world and a new world that are actually based on different principles. Namely; predictable work and not predictable work. They don’t go together. Would you like to share your views on this with us or would you like to know more about it? Send us a message.