Why Agile Planning has a High Success Rate
Agile planning factors in uncertainty; it is accepted that there will be changes to the original specification. What is more, every single person involved in the project, from stakeholders to the development team, plays an active part in project planning. This planning ranges from estimating the complexity of work to committing to doing the work. This is often depicted as the Agile Planning “Onion”. As agile planning expects change, the planning is not precise, ranging from the least precise plan at strategic level, through to daily planning, which has the greatest precision, because the team is working with a 24-hour forecast.
The Agile Planning Onion
Another important component of agile planning is the prioritization of work according to risk and utility; the riskiest and most uncertain work is tackled first, and the aim of each work iteration is to deliver some working code that the stakeholders can see and inspect. So instead of measuring project completeness by the number of activities completed along a timeline, an agile project’s progress is based on features delivered, starting with the most critical features first. In the diagram below, this is shown with a very simple agile project as an example, where the plan has four sprints and three release. Instead of waiting till the end of the project, the stakeholders already have some working software halfway through the project. What would typically happen is that, following Release 1, there would be requests for change by the stakeholders, now that the concept is starting to take shape. So we could expect that Sprint 3 would take the changes into account and the stakeholders can inspect the results in Release 2.
“Releasing early and often”- Traditional plan on top, agile below
It is clear that agile planning keeps the product development in alignment with stakeholder expectations. In a worst-case scenario, the stakeholders could decide at Release 1 to cancel the project, based on Release 1. While there was cost and effort involved, the loss is approximately half that of the traditional project.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: