How to Get the Most Out of Your Teams’ Expertise During Your Planning Meetings

As managers, it’s our job to choose what work items enter the downstream process – and why. But it’s up to the team to decide how to handle those items. Let’s discuss how you can enable your teammates to define solutions in the most collaborative and efficient way possible.

You Define the Problem; Your Team Defines the Solution

The not-so secret weapon to finding the most feasible solution is to let every member of the team contribute to the discussion based on their expertise, viewpoints and insights from their respective areas.

As a business representative, you decide the “what” and the “why.”

It’s up to your team to decide the “how.”

Take advantage of all the expertise you have in place and build on all the different narratives to get the most out of it. That’s how you’ll end up with the easiest and fastest way to solve your customers’ problems.

The goal here is to achieve an alignment between everyone involved about what needs to be done and how it will be achieved. You want your team to understand the “what” and the “why” and agree on the “how.”

How to Get the Most Out of Your Teams’ Expertise During Your Planning Meetings

Applying WIP Limits Is the Silver Bullet

To keep the conversation streamlined and effective, the amount of work that you bring to the discussion must be manageable.

And a simple but powerful way to do this is by imposing WIP limits on your two “To Do” columns.

And your WIP limits should be based on your past performance.

You want to specify the amount of work based on your own historical data because looking at the past is the best indicator of how much work your team will be able to deliver in their next iteration.

Let’s say your cadence is weekly – you want to figure out how many items per week your team is able to handle.

You can do this by using a Throughput Histogram: this tool shows you the number of completed items over a certain period – in this case, how many items have been finished in one week.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Teams’ Expertise During Your Planning Meetings

On average, they completed 2 to 3 items per week, so a logical WIP limit choice in this situation would be 3.

The limit then for both “Selected Options” and “Ready for Development” will be 3 work items.

That way, when you move work to the “Selected Options” column, you’ll only add as much as the team is capable of handling during their next iteration.

I hope this article gave you a helpful perspective on how you can draw out the various expertise, viewpoints and insights of all your team members to solve your customers’ problems in the most feasible way possible.