How to kick start your adaptive planning?
From the breakfast cereal we will eat this morning, to the direction of your business as a whole — we plan all the time. The key is to be adaptive in our planning — planning both proportionately to the risks we face while ensuring your planning is adaptive to the changing world we live in.
As the authors of ‘#NoProjects: A Culture of Continous Value’¹ wrote:
Adaptive planning, an experimentation mindset, and ability to rapidly change direction are key elements for success in the 21st century
So how do we create a simple adaptive plan?
Part 1: Making the work ready for planning
For us to be adaptive, we need to ensure work is appropriately structured to maximise our ability to have choice and independence in our decision making.
To do this — we should aim to make our items ready, using the INVEST acronym to break down the items:
Once we have enough work in the above state for at least one iteration of delivery, then we can begin our adaptive planning.
Part 2: Establishing an Adaptive Plan
To establish an adaptive plan, we will take three key steps:
By creating a consolidated backlog of all items and having them prioritized, we can focus our efforts on more deeply understanding those items of highest priority — not worrying as much about those lower priority items.
With our prioritized backlog now driving our focus, we can breakdown and more confidently estimate the near term work ready for planning into our immediate iteration — while worrying less about the accuracy of the estimates for the lower priority items.
We can then assess our historical velocity, and using to project when and what we might be able to release into the future — giving us targets we can monitor our projected delivery against.
Part 3: Monitoring progress against your Adaptive Plan
Now that we have a plan, we can iteratively plan our delivery, and monitor the execution of our plan — inspecting and adapting as we progress.
First, we should plan our next iteration based on the historical velocity — identifying a potentially valuable increment of work we can deliver that we believe is achievable within our next increment.
The team can then begin delivery of that increment — monitoring their progress against a burnup/burndown chart to monitor for deviations and blockages.
Once we deliver the increment, we can then inspect and adapt our backlog — updating our estimations and planning based on the new learnings we’ve obtained in what we delivered, and how we delivered it.
Plans are useless, planning is everthing
With adaptive planning — we need to prepare just enough work, and then forecast, plan, deliver, and learn in short iterations
By incorporating that learning to continually refine — we create a living, adaptive plan — that can respond to changing business conditions.
References
- Leybourn. E, Hastie. S (2018), #noprojects: A Culture of Continuous Value, C4Media
- Rubin. K (2012), Essential Scrum, Addison-Wesley
