Platform Engineering

Chapter 7. Planning and Delivery

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.

Robert Burns

We have seen platform engineering initiatives and leadership fail for many reasons. The most difficult failures happened when the team was building the right things, but not demonstrating it to the organization. Sometimes, these teams had insufficiently planned their projects and were caught in a long slog, building in what seemed like the right direction but taking far too long to deliver real value. In other cases the team had planned for incremental delivery but gotten unlucky with operational events beyond their control. They made things worse by failing to communicate the impact of these events to their customers, either flooding them with too much information or communicating too little.

Whether the team is failing to plan, failing to incrementally execute, or failing to educate their stakeholders on the current state of things, the view of those outside the organization is the same: this team isn’t delivering. To help you avoid this outcome, in this chapter we’ll introduce our best practices around planning and delivery for a platform organization. In the first section, we focus on planning long projects, documenting the details that can get missed when teams make optimistic assumptions about timelines and value. The second section focuses on planning your team’s roadmap from the bottom up: we’ll discuss how to balance product and project plans with other essential platform ...