Right-sizing your Agile planning with instant coffee & rockets
“We don’t need a plan, let’s just be Agile”
I wish I had tallied how many times I’ve heard those words, or a derivative of, be uttered throughout my career.
The word plan seems synonymous with waste and the traditional project management methodologies for most — often countered with the classic #NoProjects¹ warcry by the modern Agilist.
Yet even the creators of the #NoProjects movement themselves understand the value in planning, more specifically — adaptive planning:
You still need to plan for the future — there is a lot of value in planning
So if plans are valuable, how much planning should you do for any given delivery of outcomes?
What does this have to do with coffee & rockets?
There’s a common metaphor I use when coaching, and it starts by asking this very simple discussion.
How much planning should you do when making a cup of instant coffee for someone?
Try this now — answer the question in your head?
The correct answer is you need minimal planning or control — which should extend no further than just going right ahead and making the coffee.
What are the consequences of forgetting to ask for sugar? Nothing!
You can add it later if it’s missing.
The last responsible moment² for your sugar decision from the user is the moment the coffee is delivered to them.
On the other hand, if I asked you to develop a rocket that would transport people to the Moon— I dare say the amount of planning you will do will be significantly different.
I personally, will not be purchasing a ticket on your space airline without confidence that you’ve kept controls in place along the way to coordinate and control the risk of your rocket build.
Make an adaptive plan balanced for the risk
So how much planning should you do?
You should plan as much as is required to control for the key risks and tolerances — while remaining adaptive to support the incremental and interactive delivery, while rapidly changing as necessary to the learnings and feedback you receive throughout delivery.
This is where powerful leading conversations like the Inception Deck³ can be critical, allowing us to quickly have a conversation to obtain a common understanding of why we’re here, and quickly get to asking the hard questions to understand just where our risks and tolerance.
So how much should you plan for a coffee? Very little
And how much should you plan for a rocket? Quite a lot
But how much should you plan for your project? Somewhere between the coffee and the rocket — appropriate to the risks you’re seeing.
References
- Leybourn. E, Hastie. S (2018), #noprojects: A Culture of Continuous Value, C4Media
- Rubin. K (2012), Essential Scrum, Addison-Wesley
- Rasmusson. J (2010), The Agile Samurai, Pragmatic Programmers
