We’ve dedicated this area of our site to estimating and planning Agile projects.
We find we get asked a lot of questions of how this is done Agile and that it is one of the most (if not the most) important aspect to Agile to help your business division understand and accept the Agile ethos.
There is a myth that Agile projects don’t plan, don’t produce documentation as they adapt to the current situation so planning is useless and a waste of time. Agile adapting is true but without a plan how can we ensure vision or investment? What about those moments when we say “if only we’d spoken about this earlier”?
Here will include detail how we’ve tackled some of these hard questions. We will try to show the balance between creating an Agile plan that’s easy to maintain to those that are set in stone and looked upon very negatively when changed (even if the changes are for the better!).
We’ve already written some blogs in addition to this area, for these blogs visit here.
Firstly, let’s look at why we plan.
Remember Agile’s guiding value: Responding to change over following a plan
Long term plans are complex and are usually wrong. We need to accept this fact. However, quite obviously businesses find it very difficult to invest in a product or project that shows little vision or projection of what the business/customers are asking for. So, in the end, we need well balanced, adaptable plans.
Plans help us to reduce risk, increase confidence, improve on team buy-in and establishes trust with our investors.
The main balance we are looking for here is somewhere in the chasm of producing little or no plans to over investing into plans that are proven hard to change and ultimately useless.
