Agile Project Planning – The Adaptive Plan
The fundamental concept in agile planning is that the plan will be subject to change, so it is pointless to spend hours planning the minutest detail, especially toward the beginning of the project where scope is often not understood as well. Planning is done continuously and is adapted as the scope and content of the project change. Precision in planning is only required for the current iteration, later iterations are drafted, but will change.
What differentiates predictive and adaptive project management is that the former measures project completion while the latter measures product completion.
Because agile projects deliver working pieces of code that can be assessed by the customer in a series of iterations, it is easy to measure how far the product is from completion right from the first demonstration of the product developed to date.
The customer inspects the piece of product delivered and accepts it, they may ask for it to be adapted, or rejects it, asking for a major revamp. This means that the project plan going forward from this point has to be adapted too. This does not mean that the project is open-ended by any means; in a typical Scrum project the resources are fixed and everything is time-boxed, creating a stable framework for managing the project.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: