Agile Project Management - Capacity Planning

Capacity planning helps teams to commit to the right amount of work for the upcoming iteration.  The goal is to forecast future iteration/release capacities, a reasonable goal, but not really accurate because we do not know what the future holds so at the outset the forecast value is not the one that the capacity planning is focused on meeting. We should use capacity planning to find the following, on a given amount of capacity value what can I predict to accomplish with it.

Most of the time in Sprint planning we are more focused on velocity, a value that gives the value of amount of work done in a sprint which allows us to do target estimates with static team setup which is a must for agile teams as per agile manifesto.

Now let’s focus on the goal of planning future iterations.  For example our team wants to be prepared for 2 iterations into the future.  This would mean the team members would enter their capacity planning information into the future.

I am going to assume that you have given me the following for your team past sprint performance:

 Iteration N-2    Iteration N-1   Iteration N     Iteration N+1    Iteration N+2

Capacity (hrs)   100                  110                   100              120                   100

Estimate (pts)    13                    11                     10                 ?                        ?

N is the current iteration.

 From your past ratio of Estimate/Capacity I can determine a ratio that can then be used to calculate my target estimate.

 Ratio = (13+11+10)/(100 + 110 + 100) = .1096

Expected/Target Estimate

Iteration N+1 = (120)(.1096) =  13.5

Iteration N+2 = (100)(.1096) = 10.9

To summarize the key number for calculating target estimate is now Estimate/Capacity instead of Estimate/Person.

Do Product Managers try to become Project Mangers

Recently one of my colleagues posed a question to me " Why do Product Managers always try to be Project Managers", if you want to be a project managers then come to the development team.
I was taken aback by this question and had no good answer except that, " I do not wish to be a Project Manager". Later I started thinking about what he said and look for answers and here is my self reflection on that.


Wikipedia has the following distinction between a Product manager and Project Manager,
"Any type of product or service — pharmaceuticals, building construction, vehicles, electronics, computer software, financial services, etc. — may have its implementation overseen by a project manager and its operations by a product manager"[.].

Do you agree with this. Also is my colleague correct in characterizing Product Managers, as Project Managers trying to micro manage everything, tell me your thoughts.

One snippet for thought. In Wikipedia you also find the following,
"Diverse interpretations regarding the role of the product manager are the norm. The product manager title is often used in many ways to describe drastically different duties and responsibilities. Even within the high-tech industry where product management is better defined, the product manager's job description varies widely among companies. This is due to tradition and intuitive interpretations by different individuals."