The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile, 2nd Edition

14Adaptive Planning

IN CHAPTER 4, WE TALKED BRIEFLY ABOUT AGILE PLANNING PRACTICES. This chapter will go into much more detail on that subject because the approach for doing planning is one of the most important subjects for any Agile Project Manager.

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. The right solution is to fit the planning approach to the nature of the project. There are two major problems associated with why people have this difficulty with planning:

1. Dealing with uncertainty: Many people seem to 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.
2. Unrealistic expectations: A related factor is that many people develop unrealistic expectations about planning: If they develop a well‐thought‐out plan, they expect that it should work every time but Murphy’s Law often contradicts that belief.

Adaptive planning is the general term for a planning approach that evolves as a project is in progress. It is particularly well suited to an environment with a higher level of uncertainty that makes it difficult to plan well‐defined and detailed requirements for a project prior to its start. There are several important and related points to cover in this area:

• Rolling‐wave planning: It’s ...