Currently in a proxy product owner/Scrum master role, I do my planning in the following way:
- Weekly
- Retrospectives at the end of the week, sprint review on Mondays (with the stakeholder) followed by a Sprint planning meeting.
My boss the product owner has been asking me to show a gantt chart for a couple of months. I have been really pushing back on doing this because of the following reasons:
- It's based on time when I measure performance based on the teams velocity
- It is too high level. Currently one of the problems that I am currently seeing is where our original plan gets skewed by unforeseen customer requests, resulting in new features being developed for the platform which we did not originally scope. Since I do my planning weekly, I am able to adapt to change requests as they come in by adding it in the following sprint. If I have a gantt, the planning becomes very rigid if followed 100%.
- I do not want to commit to it, only for it to bite me in the ass with my boss saying 'you promised x and y thing on week 7 why hasn't it been delivered?' irrespective if we were forced to work on other things in that time.
I am thinking about doing a high level gantt chart just to keep my boss happy.
Can I do this (even if it is inaccurate) on a sprint by sprint bases?
We aim to complete x y think on x week then z thing on y week.
UPDATE TO SINCE THIS QUESTION WAS POSTED
I have been doing this for 2 weeks
Pros of Gantt Charts
- Gives a high lever overview on how you plan to structure upcoming sprints, that is easy to see. It can be used as a product roadmap.
Drawbacks
- Too rigid, cannot adapt to change at all. I have found that once requirements came in that were not originally specced, it went out of whack.
You can probably use a Gantt chart as long as you inform your stakeholder that it is subject to change.