Agile Planning
Overview
This category contains topics associated with the Agile Planning. A lot of people seem to think that Agile Planning is very difficult and some think it is a waste of time because even very well-thought-out plans often don’t work out as expected. This issue is important because it is at the crux of selecting a methodology and planning approach for a project. Do I use Agile or plan-driven (aka Waterfall)?
One of the biggest factors that effects the planning approach is the level of uncertainty in the project. In a traditional plan-driven environment, many people make the mistake of trying to make the level of uncertainty go away by developing a lot of assumptions. The problem with that approach is that many times those assumptions will turn out to be wrong and might require extensive re-planning and re-work.
How Does Agile Planning Work?
Agile uses a very different planning approach that recognizes the level of uncertainty in the project. Instead of attempting to develop a highly-detailed upfront plan, it is many times better to use a rolling-wave planning approach where the details of the plan are further elaborated as the project is in progress.
Many people seem to think of planning as an “all-or-nothing” proposition – either you develop a highly-detailed plan or you do no planning at all. I don’t believe that to be the case. There seems to be two major problems associated with why people have this difficulty with planning:
- Dealing with uncertainty, and
- Unrealistic expectations
Many people have difficulty dealing with an uncertain environment – they want things to be crystal-clear, black-and-white and, in an uncertain environment, they think that it is a waste of time to do any planning at all.
A related factor is that many people develop unrealistic expectations about planning.
- If you develop a well thought-out plan, they expect that it should work every time.
- Many people are also unrealistic that everything about a project will go absolutely perfectly all the time and
- Murphy’s Law often contradicts that belief
Related Articles
Please check the articles associated with this category for more detail: