Agile Planning - Planning on wall

Till last week we were facing serious issue with respect to our sprint planning. Team is new to Agile and except me, everybody else is working on agile project for the first time.

Time was killer factor for our planning session. Almost every single time, we are running out of time and it ends up being 1.5 day planning session for 2 week sprint. (Again Business is also responsible for this mess as those user stories were half cooked meal and there wasn't any acceptance criteria)

Last week whole picture changed when we were successful in convincing business, that its important to have user story ready well before planning session. We used their own weapon against them and warned them without well defined user stories, the software is at risk and we will never be able to release it on time :)

That worked magically!

Business spent 2 days, organizing their thought, collected input from other concerned people and finally provided us well defined user stories which has clearly written acceptance criteria.

Wow... we entered greenland for the first time on the project.

Next was our turn and this time business wanted us to estimate them such that they call get idea on when can they release the product.

Looking at our history of planning this would have taken us, probably 4-5 days, if we would have continued to follow our old practice.

But we didn't had that much time. So it was necessity that became mother of new discovery, again.

Earlier when we used to estimate each story, we all where breaking it into task(This was sprint planning, against tasks and not release planning against user stories). And then discuss scope and complexity and come up with magic figure against each task. The whole operation was single threaded as everybody was on same task card and again getting conses for magic figure was taking time too.

So this time, we thought of using multi-threading for planning. And hence one of the wall of our Ping pong house, became playground for this planning. Every body in the team had 4x6 sticky note and a pen in their hand, No body seats in the room and then we have one person read story. (This guy was really proxy for business for us) Then starts Q&A session till we get all answers. Meanwhile everybody in the team uses their sticky and start writting all possible task that they can think of and stick on the wall. Sooner (less than 2 min) we have 10-12 task hanging on wall. They we just look at the cards and eliminate dubplicates. Task keeps on comming till everybody in the team, can't think of anything new.

Then starts next step, re-arrange task into logical order, either vertical or horrizontal.

Next and final step, was to give number to each of them. That starts with top most card, and any one call out number, others either agrees or give different number and then we uses Fist-to-Five to get agreement. Game is everybody vote for the number for given task, by raising either 1-5 figures. Number of figures means, different things as follow
1: Go to hell, I can't get this at all
2: I seriously doubt
3: Well may be good, I am Ok with that
4: Sounds good to me
5: totally agree

3 onwards is fine and you can accept that number for the card. However if even single 1s or 2s means call for further discussion and then second round with new figure based on that discussion.

Well, that's all. The whole thing worked dam good. Room was filled with lot of energy as against two or three sleeping members in the chair. Everybody contributed and we had our planning doen in one and half day without any overtime. We even had two 15 min break and one hour lunch break in between.

Above all, it was team's estimate. We created it together and we owned it. This has bought automatic buy-in from all members. Whole team was happy and everybody in the team had high degree of confidence in the estimation.

The whole magic worked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I called it 1+1 > 2

Any thoughts, comments, queries, arguments??? I will be glad to hear.

Also how do you go for sprint planning?