Practice: Quarterly Cycle

I apologize for not posting a practice for the past two weeks. Here is the
next practice:

Plan work a quarter at a time. Once a quarter reflect on the team, the
project, its progress, and its alignment with larger goals.
  During quarterly planning:
  * Identify bottlenecks, especially those controlled outside the team.
  * Initiate repairs.
  * Plan the theme or themes for the quarter.
  * Pick a quarter's worth of stories to address those themes.
  * Focus on the big picture, where the project fits within the
organization.

  A season is another natural, widely shared timescale to use in
organizating time for a project. Using a quarter as a planning horizon
synchronizes nicely with other business activities that occur quarterly.
Quarters are also a comfortable interval for interaction with external
suppliers and customers.

  The separation of "themes" from "stories" is intended to address the
tendency of the team to get focused and excited about the details of what
they are doing without reflecting on how this week's stories fit into the
bigger picture. Themes also fit well into larger-scale planning such as
drawing marketing roadmaps.

  Quarters are also a good interval for team reflection, finding
gnawing-but-unconscious bottlenecks. You can also propose and evaluate
long-running experiments quarterly.



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