Yesterday, I wrote about backlogs and what your team includes in them.  Well, it seems that backlogs are on my mind a lot this week.  Today, I was working on a backlog for a new project and was considering what should be in it.  How far ahead should I be looking and what should the granularity of the stories be?  This brought to mind the idea of planning horizons and prioritization. 

The backlog I assembled is for the rollout of agile practices throughout our company's enterprise.  So, I have some things that require immediate attention and some that I know we won't be considering for a few months.  What I decided was to create a backlog with several planning horizons embedded in it.  The near term horizon has stories that are well defined.  The medium range horizon (2-3 months out) has stories that are defined but are still kind of fuzzy.  And the long range horizon (3-6 months or more out) has stories that are really just headlines.  As we move ahead in time, I'll work to increase the granularity of the medium and long range stories as they get closer to implementation.  We do this on all of our agile projects.  What is does is effectively reduce the waste of spending too much upfront time defining the details of a story that may or may not ever be implemented.

The next thing I had to do was start prioritizing the stories.  Instead of spending too much time prioritizing the entire list, I actually went through the list and did a top ten list of stories.  I know that we aren't going to work through more than 10 stories in the next 4 weeks, so I think that prioritizing beyond that can be wasteful as well.  As we complete stories on the top ten list, we'll move new stories into the top ten to keep it constantly stocked. 

I think that the use of both of these ideas keeps the backlog in alignment with value production and reduce waste.