Admin Onboarding - Organizing the When: Understanding Planning Cadences

Overview - Managing the "When" through Cadences

In DevStride, the "how" and "when" of the work is managed through boards and custom time-cycle cadences.

These features provide organizations a structured approach to establishing predictable workflows, managing and aligning teams, and ensuring efficient work execution.

Specific dates in cadences are not required in DevStride - cadences can simply be predefined units of time - time boxes that repeat, for example, every 2 weeks, every month, etc.

In addition, you can choose to manage work items in a non-cadence kanban board, called a perpetual board, which is like an ongoing list.

In this article, we will cover how to set up time-cycle based boards using cadences.

Understanding Cadences

With cadences, DevStride ties the timeframe of your boards to the entire data model of the system for the purposes of planning, capacity, automations, assignments, and reporting.

Items that a project team is ready to commit for work are moved to boards. Then a cadence can be applied to dictate when the work should be done.

Here's the cadence set up screen, below. The cadences in this image are just examples - here, we are showing a longer Program Increment cadence (1) and smaller sprint cadences (2). There is no limit to the different cadences you can set up for use in your organization.

DevStride cadences are flexible and methodology agnostic.

This means DevStride allows you to plan using cadences whether your team uses an agile approach, employing typical 2-week sprints, or prefers to manage project planning on a monthly, quarterly, or other basis, as in waterfall and hybrid frameworks.

In addition, the functionality extends to the gantt chart feature for teams who have date-driven deliverables.

Cadences offer unmatched flexibility in that they can be set by each working group for the time cycles they prefer to use.

Key Benefits of Cadences

Predictable Planning: Establishes a regular rhythm for work execution.

Performance Tracking: Measures execution efficiency against planned work.

Scalability: Supports a hierarchy of cadences for different planning levels.

Automatic Board Creation: Ensures alignment between work cycles and execution tracking.

Flexibility: Cadences can be customized by each working group for a particular set of work.

Cadence Hierarchy

DevStride supports a nested cadence structure, allowing users to create parent-child relationships for planning at different levels, such as:

In Scaled Agile planning:
Program Increment (PI) (e.g., every 12 weeks)
→ Sprint Cadences (e.g., every 2 weeks)
→ → Daily Work Units
→→→ etc.

In Waterfall planning:
Annual planning
→ Quarterly Planning
→→ Monthly Planning
→→→ etc.

This hierarchy ensures that long-term initiatives (such as product development features or marketing campaigns) are broken down into smaller, manageable tasks and timelines.

For example, in larger projects or initiatives, product development is often managed during a lengthier program increment planning cadence. Then, units of work (such as features or epics) are decomposed into smaller units of work such as user stories or tasks. These shorter tasks are managed in sprint cadences within that hierarchy.

For other initiatives, like marketing, campaigns might represent the larger units of work during a quarterly cadence, which is then broken down into monthly and weekly cadences.

Next Up: Setting Up Cadences