Learn to use Leftwards Planning with your team

Available as 1 day or 2 half-days. Up-to 8 People.
Send an email to book a workshop:
[email protected]

Designed for leaders who want more detailed hands-on training for their team(s). You have the option of working on a realistic case-study, or a very real project from your own company.

Learners will walk away with a consistent way to plan and evaluate projects, getting all the benefits of Leftwards planning: shorten project timelines, get lots of people working together, increase transparency, remove risks, and get ahead of the unknowns. Additionally, the workshop goes beyond "Leftwards Planning", helping your teams interact with product managers and stakeholders to get better defined small slices to work on before planning even starts.

• Successfully plan a project’s delivery, including identifying how many developers you will need, and where to remove project risk.
• Interact with and challenge requirements in a constructive way that moves the project forward.
• Make work happen in parallel without creating a mess.
• Figure out how to remove risk even before everything is fully figured out.
• Protect the most important parts of a project’s timeline.
• Learn how to manage workloads to avoid bottlenecks and slowdowns.
• Avoid padding estimates, especially avoid using SWAG ("Scientific Wild-Ass Guess") estimates.
• Get out of the "one story = one developer = one ticket = one pull request" trap that turns a "team" into meerly a "group of people with the same boss".
• Gain the skills to block scope creep.

Who's involved?

Bing your delivery team (the devs, team lead, and the product manager).

This setup allows us to have high quality discussions about the messy day-to-day work. It helps ensure they're not just learning the theory, but instead that outcomes from the workshop that transfer into their normal job.

Maximum group size is 8 people. If you need to train multiple teams, we should run multiple sessions.

How does it work?

• Entirely online*.
• Booked as two half-days or one full day.
• Senior level and up.
• Walk away with the skills the plan a development project.
• 1-hour Q&A call available any time 30 days after the session.

*In-person is possible within Germany and some EU/EEA countries.

Leftwards Planning Benefits

“Leftward Planning” starts with a very concrete goal in mind and maps out task dependencies backwards from that goal, this ensures we use “convergent thinking” to arrive at one goal, and not “divergent thinking” to open up many possibilities. This helps fight one of the biggest challenging in planning: starting with assumptions about what to build first and trying to find your way back to the goal always leads to scope creep and confusion.

The second major pillar for this planning framework is to demystify how big any task is by being very specific about it. We don’t simply find out if a task is big or small, but rather if it is complicated because it is: a challenging topic, requires more learning, or is simply a high-effort task with low complexity. We constantly push to make all tasks “small”, which allows us to easily do things like resource planning and come up with good estimates of when a project can be completed.

Lastly, this methodology offers the missing link that traditionally allows technical scope creep and uncertainty to keep showing up long-term: we maintain a list of common agreements on how to approach tasks. This is by no means a silver bullet, but simply standardizing approaches will eliminates the majority of ad-hoc disagreements or growing complexity that show up (typically mid-project and early-project when everyone wants to try something new).

What won’t you get?

A highly academic explanation of CPM, CCPM, and PERT.

These are all great project management frameworks and inspired the planning method we will use in this course, however we are more focused on how to make the entire planning process simple and produce great results, so we simplify these models and arrange something slightly different that works really well for planning a software development project that would be typical in any tech startup.

A tool to help you innovate

Project planning is only useful when you know the goal you need to reach (if you don't know, you need to work on "discovery" not "planning").

Architecture Design

This planning method gives you a way to create buffers for these unknown, as well as a process to only build on stable agreements. However, planning itself will not help if your real problem is trying to evaluate which architecture to use.

What do you need to bring?

Because this isn’t a lecture but really an interactive workshop, we’ll need you to bring a few things with you!

If you want to use a real project instead of our prepared example, we should have some alignment calls before-hand and you may need to share project requirements inside your team ahead of the workshop.

The absolute basics of using Miro (drawing boxes, writing text, adding lines between boxes). You’ll need to participate!

If the session is virtual, we need every participant to be on their own individual laptop. The poor sound quality and inability to participate when everyone gathers around one laptop in a conference room leads to a very poor experience for everyone.

Available as 1 day or 2 half-days. Up-to 8 People.
Send an email to book a workshop:
[email protected]