Enhancing Visibility in Agile Program Increment DSMs
Siddharth Bajpai, Nitin R. Joglekar, Steven D. Eppinger · 2020
Program Increments (PIs) are sequences of consecutive sprints during SAFe implementation of agile developments. SAFe work is planned at two levels of granularity: (i) stories, which create tasks (within a sprint team) and account for task interactions at a fine level of granularity; and (ii) features (often decomposed into stories), which account for interactions at a coarser level of granularity. A common practice in PI planning, involving 10-15 teams, is to suppress interactions at the story level and focus on interactions at the feature level instead. We create two DSMs for a PI planning process – one based on story interactions, and another based on feature interactions. We find a nearly 9X increase in interactions at the finer level, i.e. more granular interaction, compared to a DSM based on coarser level interaction data. We discuss theory and practice implications for using more granular DSMs during PI Planning and oversight processes.