As the fourth value
in the agile manifesto (link) is: ”Responding to change over
following a plan”, I have often experienced that it is difficult to
convey to a team, why we should plan when we know it is going to be
changed later anyway. Why not just start coding and act.
Many agile methods such as
XP and Scrum actually has a lot of planning activities in them, and
actually follow a quite strict schedule, although that schedule is
very different from waterfall methods. But I find that few can
explain the paradox of why planning is necessary when we don’t plan
on following it anyway.
And then I read this
little insight in a book not at all related to agile or programming,
but to leadership and it struck me that it was the reason why even
agile methods emphasize planning activities, although they value
responding to change over following a plan.
The insight is this little
quote from a book called Lateral Leadership:
”The goal
of planning, however, is not high quality plans but high quality
work.”
So when the
team ask why they must plan the answer is to heighten the quality of
the work they are doing. Work must have a direction, something to
work towards, a vision of how the world will be, when our product is
finished. And that is what planning does – it gives us a goal, and
with a goal it is much easier to see what the next step towards that
goal is.
If we look
at planning this way, how good a plan is can then be measured by
looking at the output of the work that comes from following the plan.
This can then be used as input for retrospectives, where we can
suddenly ask ourselves, if improved planing can help improve our
quality.
It can also
help us set the time span of an iteration, as when following the plan
no longer provide high quality work or value for the customer, then
we should look at stopping to follow the plan or change the plan –
i.e. start a new iteration.
The
last thing I really like with this definition of what a constitutes
good planning is that it gives us an external measure of whether a
plan is good. A plan is no longer measured on if it meet certain
criteria or conforms to a certain standard. It can be valued on the
output – did we get the value we wanted when we did the planning.
What
do you tell your team, when they ask you why they should do all that
planning?
