Flexible Planning

I sometimes have trouble with explaining to people the basic concept behind agile way of thought regarding project planning and management. Recently i cam across this gem, which as far as i could tell is unrelated to software but in my eyes does a marvelous job at explaining these ideas.

just to make sure i understand, I’ll recap his main points.

there are two way of planning and managing a project:

the classical way – set your goals as the result you want to achieve, from those goes backward and derive the steps needed in order to achieve these goals.from these decide on your plan of action and than just try to follow that plan.

Flexible Planning – goes a little different. you still start out by setting the goals as desired results. but instead of going backward from them, you start by examining where you are and then pick a single action to do that will bring you closer to these goals.when you finish doing that action you evaluate your position again and again pick a single action that will advance you towards your goal. hopefully given enough time you reach your goal.

these two approaches are completely different, the first one when applied to software projects will result in a Gannt chart depicting your plan and by trying to forcing the organization follow that plan. in some places management will even put several check points to and allow the plan to change (which in most cases when facing reality that is a must). The second approach is in my opinion embodied in all agile processes. its an inspect and adopt process. you take one step inspect your new state and adopt you next actions.

The funniest about this, is that i used to work at a company which was in all aspects attempting to be and was an “agile” company. However, in one of the higher management meeting, I was told to plan my work and my team goals using the first approach. Sadly only today I can recognize the contradiction.

Posted in: Agile Principles,Planning,Random Thoughts