The Quarterly Planning event is a crucial, product family level face-to-face meeting that fosters alignment among stakeholders and teams. It helps to communicate a shared vision for the product family and strategic objectives as well as to identify objectives for the upcoming quarter. Teams collaboratively identify new objectives based on their capacity and the capabilities (from capability cards) they aim to deliver. During the event, the scope of capabilities might be adjusted, with some excluded from the final list or their scope expanded or reduced. Teams then break down these capabilities into placeholder stories to build a clear roadmap.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) offers a detailed PI Planning agenda for Agile Release Trains (ARTs). Lean-Agile practitioners can leverage this approach when suitable.

However, the Lean-Agile Practitioner Toolkit focuses on the minimum viable activities needed to reap the benefits of Quarterly Planning. Similar to all our Lean-Agile Guidelines, practitioners should adapt these tools and techniques to their specific organizational and team contexts.

Benefits of Quarterly Planning event:

Even for a single team, embracing a quarterly planning approach unlocks numerous benefits:

• Enhanced Visibility: Gain a clear picture of upcoming work and priorities.
• Improved UCD-Development Sync: Ensure User-Centered Design (UCD) activities seamlessly flow into development.
• Stronger Team Coordination: Foster collaboration across different roles.
• Strategic Alignment: Align efforts with business vision, goals, and product family objectives.
• Proactive Risk Management: Identify and mitigate potential risks and dependencies. (especially between among the teams in the same Product Family)
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Encourage collaboration between teams.
• Demand-Capacity Match: Balance workload with team capacity.
• Efficient Decision-Making: Make timely and well-informed decisions.
• Boosted Team Spirit: Strengthen team collaboration through face-to-face interaction and potential social events.

Quarterly Objectives

Quarterly Objectives are a list of capabilities and improvement actions that the team agreed and planned to deliver during the next quarter. It’s one of the outputs of the Quarterly Planning event.

An example: