Effective Software Project Management

Traditional Versus Extreme Project Planning

Planning the Extreme project is certainly different from planning the Traditional project, and it is even different from planning the Adaptive project. I like to think of the Extreme project plan as a high-level plan for the next cycle, which contains a number of parallel swim lanes each defining a probative initiative. The time spent on planning for the next cycle should be minimal. Once the deliverables for the coming cycle are identified and assigned to team members, they may wish to do some lower-level planning for the work they are about to undertake. Even that plan should not be too detailed. The reason is simple. Change is very likely. Swim lanes come and go on a moment’s notice. Time is not wasted pursuing probative initiatives that don’t seem fruitful. Even in mid-cycle, a probative initiative can be cancelled and written off as a dead end. Effort is refocused on new or promising initiatives. The daily 15-minute team meetings are the place for team members to discuss their progress against any plan or schedule they may have put in place for their work.

As discussed earlier, the Traditionalist planning is something you do once at the very beginning of the project. The project plan specifies tasks, durations, resource requirements, task dependencies, and a schedule. The project manager, customer, and development team collaborate on the development of the plan, and now the project manager is expected to deliver against that plan. ...