I’ve blogged a bit about planning poker lately (Planning Poker and Planning Poker – Why does it work?). This time it’s the anchoring effect. You might have heard about the anchoring effect before and you can read more about it at Wikipedia, but here is an example of why anchoring in planning poker is not wanted:

David is Product Manager. Jonny is team lead. He’s been in this company since the startup 5 years ago. David, Jonny and the rest of the team sit down for a round of planning poker. Before they vote, David reads the user story to be estimated and asks if there are any questions. Some questions come up and get quickly answered by David and Jonny. Before they start to vote, Jonny says:

    “This should be very simple, shouldn’t take us more than a couple of days”.

Jonny has now put out the anchor. When all votes are in, not surprisingly they’re all unanimous on 2 days. Jonny could have left out his guess on 2 days, and there would still be an anchoring effect. This is because he states “this should be very simple”.

When playing planning poker you should try to talk about the story without mentioning anything about your impression of the complexity or timeframe of the story. This will allow your team to estimate more honestly. If Jonny didn’t say what he said in my previous example, someone might have voted much higher and forced a discussion that would have highlighted something previously unknown to the story. As soon as the anchor is out there, this seldom happens.