I’m often quite wordy in my blogs. I’ll pose an initial question in the title, throw out a thousand words or so, and then present a conclusion. I’m not going to do that here. Instead I’ll be much more succinct.
Is forecasting evil in agile portfolios?
YES!
The context for this conclusion and subsequent discussion is three-fold:
- Forecasting when you are just building your agile teams OR are in the early stages of an agile transformation;
- And, when you’ve been doing agile for awhile, and you’ve become overconfident with your capacity awareness;
- And forecasting in this sense is anyone determining how large or how long something will take and NOT fully engaging their team in the estimation, planning and forecasting.