Planning for quality

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?