The Agile Projector

…and the ways we try to avoid doing it

Planning is hard. From a Product standpoint, we don’t always know exactly what we want or how to express, understand or predict what the customer wants in terms of the user experience in our product.

So we have to make some amount of guesses.

And when you guess, you sometimes guess wrong, and you end up back at the drawing board.

So the reaction to this in the Agile Manifesto was essentially to give up planning in favor of being really good at reversing, turning, and accelerating, at least until the next guess is wrong. In the extreme, just imagine a race car trying to discover where the road is in the dark by driving as fast as possible over every surface available. Very Agile! Not very efficient.

Given this over-indexing on Agility at the expense of planning, it’s no wonder that so many of us have become weak at planning, to the point that we don’t even think that good planning is even possible, let alone worthwhile.

It’s also easy to stay this way when we see plans constantly shifted or thrown out with new priorities and new conditions (external and internal). It’s easy to shrug and say “what’s the use?”

But there are two impactful realities that require planning:

• The business needs to invest in all of the go-to-market motions for things the Technology team need to deliver. These investments are often enormous and can span months. To make them effective, Marketing and Sales need clarity on what is coming and when, and also Customer Success who will need to roll it out and support it. All manner of soft or hard commitments are made to customers about what to expect. All of this requires a plan, and the ability to align, execute and deliver on it.
• Great architecture sometimes requires investments in capabilities that are worth nothing until the entire plan comes together, late in delivery. If we do not plan for great architecture, we end up under a mound of technical debt. Every change in course in the system design becomes an expensive and risky refactoring. If we don’t look forward, we are blind to the big wins that take patience and forethought, and we deliver a mess of spaghetti and duct tape.

When we don’t know how to plan, and we rely on our Agility alone, we end up with high risks of misunderstanding which get discovered late, if at all, and which cannot be remedied by just driving faster. The usual course is to compromise with a dose of customer disappointment, a dose of business disappointment, tech debt growth, and a lot of late nights for the Technology team.

The Agile Projector gives your teams fine grained control over how much planning they do – four weeks – six weeks – twelve weeks – and allows you to control your balance of fidelity vs. flexibility at any point along the way. Through scenario planning, delivery projections, and on-demand, real-time integration with Jira, you, your teams, your architecture, your business and your customers no longer need to fly unilaterally and blindly into surprise, compromise and loss of trust.