All Plans are Literally Fragile!

One of the constant questions when moving to agile or any of the variations of new ways of working is “do you still plan”? There are common misconceptions that you are now unbound from traditional approaches leaving you free to experiment, review your progress and then hopefully at some point hit your goal. The days of the big up front plan hopefully being numbered for those going down the new ways of working path. Well for those without the luxury of years worth of time, or the infinite number of monkeys tapping away on their keyboard potentially planning is now in the past, for the rest of us the answer is yes, you still have to plan. In fact you will be planning a good deal more now. The nature of planning has changed away from one big up front planning session to one of continuous planning based on feedback from actual experience and measurable data.

This takes discipline and experience to do well. The good news is that this mirrors ‘real’ life far more closely than traditional methods and should feel more instinctive and intuitive to follow. A core value of agile is ‘responding to change over following a plan’. Note this says ‘over’ and not ‘instead of’. You still need a plan to start with, you just have to be open to it changing , and in the modern world that change is likely to be constant.