Effective Software Project Management

Traditional Versus Agile Project Planning

To the traditionalist, planning is something you do once at the very beginning of the project. For the traditional project manager resources are scheduled and committed against a project plan and then managed to conformance with that plan. Any variances from the plan are corrected as needed.

Having a complete plan sounds great, but is it worth the effort? Every change request that is approved requires some modification to the plan. The modification almost always requires some rescheduling, negotiating with resource managers to adjust commitments, and finally documenting and communicating the changes to all affected parties. If you cost out the changes, you can see that time was spent on parts of the plan that are no longer needed. That time spent was wasted time—non-value-added time to the agilest.

To the agilist, planning is something you do just-in-time and continuously through the project. The agilest does not speculate on the future as does the traditionalist. Change can render that time wasted time and that is a no-no to the agilest. Just-in-time planning is the only thing that makes sense to the agilest. For the agile project manager the only meaningful metric is business value delivered as measured against business value planned, and corrections are made as necessary.