There are different types of planning a project. Traditional ways establish each step from scratch, leaving no space for future changes; meanwhile, agile planning is the opposite. 

Agile project planning is designed for change via an iterative perspective to planning. These changes are put into practice after completing a small design process and releasing the product to the users. 

In other words, agile planning is flexible, prone to changes and new points of view, and continuously evolves to provide good portions of the final product or solution.

Embrace the change in project management with an Agile Planning process!

Agile project management divides the plan into several stages called "releases." A release is the creation of a new product or a significant update to an existing product.

At the same time, a release is divided into several minor stages, or iterations, called "Sprints." These sprints have a determined length and a series of items to work through in each specific sprint.

As we mentioned earlier, agile projects are continuously changing based on the feedback of clients and the experience of users. So, one of the most critical project management practices here is to consider what is best for those users. 

Items or articles that satisfy these users' needs are called "User Stories" or "Features." 

Teams can use features to track progress, enhance some particular development, test processes, etcetera.

Agile principles say that the team only creates specifications and documents for each user's needs. During the sprint, the agile team should be capable of identifying those requirements and know how to address them to carry on the agile project plan. 

This way, stakeholders can develop their tasks while managing projects in the best way possible, delivering their conclusions and resolutions.

Sprints in any agile project plan must have the same length. Thus, the involved agile teams can repeat the process. This practice ensures that the entire team achieves better results and a better-finished product.

This iterative process leads to a better use of time since team members learn what to do during the sprint and how many stories they can complete. In this sense, the agile project management methodology is incremental since the knowledge is accumulated throughout the subsequent processes.

In an agile plan, the development team is part of planning and estimation, not just management. Teams decide the complexity of stories during the sprint planning process. This way, the team leverages what is better for their participants. 

The process of defining the complexity of the work is called Story Point. 

For instance, a specific team can assign 1 story point to a primary user story, 2-3 points for not-so-basic stories, and 4-5 points for a complex story or feature.

Before starting a project with an agile methodology, the organization's project manager should be capable of identifying a general scope, a business case, and the product roadmap. 

The project execution starts with a preplanning phase where the teams collect all the required data, such as technical requirements, time, and cost estimation.

Technical requirements are called "product backlog," containing everything necessary to deliver a final product.

At this point, there are two types of backlogs you should consider:

• Product backlog. A list of all things that will be built into the product;
• Iteration backlog. A list of items that will be built during the current iteration.

Thanks to this, the development teams can estimate the time it takes to perform and release activities. Teams can also calculate the general project duration and the overall cost in a rough way.

Now you have a general perspective of how many resources the project will require, the cost, and the duration, it's time to plan the releases and iterations. 

Here your organization can decide whether to release each iteration when it becomes available or release a collection of iterations rather than just one.

Besides, your team can plan right after finishing the product backlog or after completing the first iterations.

In this step, stakeholders break the functionality in the backlog into a certain number of iterations completed in the estimated time. They add iterations to releases. Besides, based on the release plan, they can identify the time for the release milestones.

One of the best practices to evaluate the needed time and plan estimates for an iteration is to check past features' delivery time.

For instance, if your team could deliver X number of features in previous software development projects for iteration, it's evident that it can provide X number of features in the current iteration.

Other good practices to estimate the length of milestones are the following:

• Be realistic, not optimistic;
• Consider historical data;
• Estimate the time of small specific tasks rather than larger ones.

Here the project team also evaluates the labor cost of the team and identifies iterations to calculate the overall project cost. Material costs also must be added to this number.

Once your team finishes an iteration, you can recalculate the time to complete a project based on the customer's changes to the backlog. The scope is locked only in the current iteration!

The number of releases and iterations can also change as the backlog can change—the result of an iteration and the release planning influence each other.

If your team removes or adds features, the number of future iterations and the collection of iterations could change.

Finally, your team can summarize all these changes activities, i.e., modifying priorities, the scope, or the total project length in the "Manage Product Backlog."

From the beginning of the same process, i.e., from every iteration, you should gather all the team to discuss key features, and every member should report their status in detail. Below you'll find the essential characteristics of daily standup meetings:

• They do not take over 15 minutes long. This duration should be a fixed length. 
• It can also be a retrospective meeting to discuss a previous iteration and how team members achieve new results. In this sense, every member has only one minute to report their advances and accomplishments.
• The task status can be only labeled with "done" or "not done." If it's the second label, typically, the member should mention how many hours remain to finish the task. All the team should update time tracking to improve the team's velocity.  
• Obstacles team members find through unit tests should be stated and discussed later in different stages. 
• The scrum master is responsible for helping team members overcome obstacles by using new features and considering customer needs.

Now we give you some agile planning templates your project teams can download to use on a building software project and adopt agile approaches. 

Agile Project Plan Template

Some agile method guidelines are mandatory to perform agile scheduling to improve results and achieve estimated goals.

• Involve the entire team in iterative development. Scheduling and estimating are team activities, so every team member should be part of the process, even to promote buy-in.
• Schedule in detail only for the current or next iteration. Small intervals, or iterations, are perfect for managing uncertainty. If you schedule too far in advance (such as traditional methodologies), you won’t be able to respond to changes in features, priorities, and more.
• Design and testing are parts of the development process. Designing solutions and making test-driven development are fundamental activities during iterations and estimating schedules.  
• Sprint planning meetings are an integral part of teamwork. Running an iteration planning meeting will help you to analyze the release plan and change priorities, features, and time of new iterations.
• Teamwork and collaboration are indispensable. Agile plans consider individual tasks and interactions, but teamwork and collaboration are two of the main principles. An agile work method considers a product owner and managers, but the team owns the plan and is responsible for project requirements and deadlines.

New markets require velocity, faster data-driven decisions, implementation of the right tools to achieve better results, and participation of all stakeholders in the projects. Agile planning is crucial to reach a potentially shippable product increment and satisfy customer needs.   

In agile methodology, all the members of your organization are on the same page, contributing to building an excellent software product, changing priorities, and paying particular attention to previous sprints and experience.

If you still need to try, we encourage you to implement this development to add the most value to your results.