The project manager evaluates project risks with the team and updates the Risk List. The risk list will aid the team in prioritization of what to do in which iteration. Higher-ranked risks are tackled and planned for earlier iterations then lower-ranked risks.

Analyze the size and the Vision of the project, and whether it is realistic to deliver what is asked for within the constraints of the project.

If the project is feature-driven, meaning that release criteria is defined as a set of features captured in the Work Items List, the team assesses the size of these work items, see Guideline: Agile Estimation. They then look at how many people they would need to complete these work items, which gives them a ballpark understanding of project duration, staffing profile, and scope.

If the project instead is date-driven, the team assesses how much work can roughly be done in the time-frame given and using the available team, captured as a candidate list of work items.

The end result of the two approaches is the same; a rough understanding of the size of the capabilities to be delivered, the size of the team, and expected time of completion.

Determine iteration length, see Concept: Iteration, or use 4 weeks as default iteration length. Use iteration length to assess target velocity, see Guideline: Agile Estimation. Based on the target velocity and overall size of the project, calculate the number of iterations required.

Determine 1-3 high-level objectives of each iteration, The goal is to create a high-level plan outlining how you can build the resulting application in the given set of iterations. The plan will change as you learn more, so time-box this analysis to a few hours or less. Use the Work Items List to outline what features to implement in what iteration, putting top priority work items first. This can be done rapidly by leveraging expected velocity and size estimate of work items.

Produce a brief summary of your analysis in your plan by documenting 1-3 objectives for each iteration. Do not commit individual work items to the plan, since this will force too much re-planning. For some projects, you may have to wait until after the first iteration until you can provide a meaningful plan at this level of detail.

Phases provide a focus for a team on meeting key management objectives, see Concept: Iteration. For example the Elaboration phase should answer the question “Do we agree on the overall solution, and do we understand risks, costs and schedule parameters reasonably well?”

With this in mind, the project manager determines the start and end dates of the phases and aligns the content of the iterations with the perspective of the phase. Therefore the objectives of the iterations assigned to a phase, need to map to the goals of its phase. The milestones, which guard the transition from one phase to another, will provide checkpoints if these goals are satisfied.  Revisit the plan to see if you should change the focus of iterations to allow more rapid completion of certain phases.

The project manager assigns project members (people) to roles according to a table like this:

The project manager needs to make sure that the roles are staffed according to skills and interests and that every role is covered.