Project Scoping and Resource Planning

Hi everyone,

Our business is new to Agile, as am I, and I'm essentially trying to take on the role of PO, SM and internal Programme Project Manager all at the same time (wish me luck).

We have a business case process that we're trying to refine, which will eventually feed into requesting additional resource if deemed necessary. These are for things that will take multiple sprints to complete. It essentially goes:

• (Anyone in the business) Raise business case / suggest idea for new product / feature

• Sanity check from manager that it's a good idea

• Dev T-shirt size

• Get approval for further scoping

• Level 2 scoping

• Get approval to do the work

• Add work to roadmap

• Create tickets and refine work 6-8 weeks out

• Begin work

The "Level 2 scoping" phase should:

• Gather user stories

• Come up with a general idea of how we will do the work

• Give an estimate as to how many man-days this might take (and state a % level of accuracy)

We can then look at all the approved business cases and decide roughly what we want to fit into the coming year, based on the aggregated man-days estimates (with the understanding that these are only estimates).

If the man-days of the pieces of work we want to do is more than the man-days we have in a year, then that enables us to request budget for additional Developers.

The problem is that the man-days estimates are very hard to do and not in line with Agile as I understand it.

I'm interested to hear how others:

1. scope work on a new product and

2. request budget to grow their teams

Many thanks, 

Josh