The Purpose of Planning

A project plan is a covenant between the customer and the product developers, giving clarity of what will be delivered when, and how much it will cost. It improves the confidence level in the project and the customer can identify what the percentage completion of the project is to date (Note that the project completion percentage is not the same thing as the product completion percentage).

Traditional Planning – the Predictive Plan

One of the chief skills of any project manager is project planning, followed up by monitoring progress on and compliance to the plan. In traditional project planning, the scope of the project is fixed right at the outset, and the project manager builds his plan based on the understanding that there will be little or no change to the scope. While the whole aim of a project plan is to adhere to it with as little deviation as possible, where changes are to be made they usually involve changes to resources, time and budget, rather than any scope change. Such plans are followed faithfully, and sometimes very successfully. When things do go wrong though, one gets typical situations, such as the “death march”, where the projected end date is long past, the project is way over budget and the final destination is still over the horizon.

Another problem with predictive planning is that a project can be completed within time and budget, but the deliverable is not what the customer expected or wants. It can be very hard to visualise a product accurately, especially if it is intangible, like software, so, even if the specifications were developed in good faith, because of the lack of collaboration in a traditional project, the customer does not always get the opportunity to try out the product and find flaws in the design before completion. This is not a project planning problem per se, but predictive planning does not welcome change to the original product spec., which contributes to the problem. Agile development, on the contrary, both welcomes and expects change, so predictive planning is not the ideal approach, mainly because it is not geared towards scope change. This has also given rise to the mistaken impression that agile projects are not planned.

Recommended Further Reading

The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: