A student in one of my online Agile Project Management courses made a comment that an adaptive project methodology required a lot more planning because the planning is spread out throughout the project and re-planned using a rolling wave approach rather than being done once upfront.
It might actually be true that the total amount of planning could be greater in an adaptive process but there is no requirement to do a certain amount of planning at all. I think the fundamental problem here is that many people think that a given process or methodology requires a certain amount of planning and they do it mechanically.
The general rule that I think makes sense in any methodology is that you should only do whatever planning produces value for the business sponsors of the project (the people who are paying the bills). Planning can produce value for the business sponsors in different ways – here are a few examples:
- It might help to identify and mitigate risks before they happen and avoid unanticipated problems or surprises
- It might provide a higher level of predictability over the costs and schedule of the project, and
- It might make people in the project more productive by better organizing and anticipating the work to be done
If you’re doing what you think is an excessive amount of planning in a project and it’s not really producing value, why do it at all?
The key message is that you should:
- Adapt the level of planning to fit the situation (Plan what you need to plan)
- Manage the process (by doing what you think makes sense in a given situation) rather than letting the process manage you and following what you think the process requires mechanically
It takes a lot of skill and judgment to adapt a process with the right level of planning to fit a given situation. Planning in an Agile environment is similar to documentation. Some people have assumed that planning is not appropriate in an Agile environment just as some people have assumed that documentation is not appropriate in an Agile environment. Neither of those assumptions is correct – both planning and documentation should be used intelligently in an Agile environment where they produce value.