Planning is Everything

This scrum master
wants to be more like Ike.

It takes plenty of emotional energy to be a scrum master or agile coach.  Developers need guidance, product owners need constant coaching, and upper management is always asking for status updates.  It is psychologically exhausting.  Along with day-to-day chores, you are planning and setting strategy.  This week I want to discuss how planning and responding to change are not mutually exclusive.

According to the Agile Manifesto, responding to change is more important than following a plan.  Situations in technology are changing at a rapid clip and an idea that seemed plausible an hour ago can be hopelessly out of date.  Agility depends so much on responding to change.  The unintended consequence of this is business leaders abandoning planning altogether because “We are doing agile we don’t need plans.” Let me try to add a little sanity to this discussion.

The manifesto states, “…while there is value in the items on the right, we value items on the left more.”  Planning has some value and should not be abandoned because we are responding to change.  It seems like a contradiction.

Planning is an integral part of agile.  A scrum team does sprint planning before the start of a sprint to decide what they are going to do.  The product owner does release planning to prioritize stories in the backlog.  A plan makes it possible for an agile team to understand the nature of the problems they are trying to solve.  It also allows them to learn how to respond to change when the inevitable happens.  It explains why Dwight David Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”  When a team plans they are going over possible scenarios which might happen during a sprint.  The team is also doing much of the analysis necessary to start writing unit tests and code.

To use a metaphor from music, Jazz and Blues musicians still rehearse even though much of their music is improvisational.  The players outline key progressions and cords they are going to play.  It is the plan they use for their performance.  Once the concert begins, situations may dictate a deviance from the scheme.  Thanks to the outlines figured out during the rehearsal, these musicians can respond to change.  The same thing happens to a development team during a sprint.

So responding to change is important but you cannot respond to change unless you have spent some time planning to understand what changes might happen.

Until next time.