Agility vs. Predictability

Are you operating in an Agile environment, but still saddled with legacy Project Planning requirements that insist upon long-term plans, Gantt charts, and fixed milestone deliverables?

Does your client want you to move fast, be flexible, and adapt, but also commit to a feature roadmap with fixed dates a year or more in the future?

This is the exact challenge I faced for more than a decade while leading Agile delivery inside Federal agencies that were mired in waterfall thinking and tied to annual budget cycles.

How did I solve it, and how can you? By operating in a time frame that falls between the immediate and the long term: the Program Increment.

For those not familiar, a Program Increment (PI) is a group of concurrent sprints, generally 3 to 5, punctuated by a planning event. PI planning is where objectives and commitments are made for the upcoming cycle. The total length of a PI, including planning, may be around 2 to 3 months, while the goal of each PI is to release a set of features that all parties agree are most important.

Using this 2-to-3-month framework, you can plan, operate, deliver, and report effectively to both technical and business stakeholders. For agile purposes, break down features into stories and manage them by sprint using a planning board and kanban techniques. For traditional planning, use features as your milestones to satisfy annual, waterfall-style reporting requirements.

For advanced planning, build a PI project plan template based on your team’s established velocity. Include placeholder milestones for the number of features you typically complete. During annual planning, fill in the placeholders with target features based on preliminary sizing and business priorities. In this way, you’ll project when each feature can be delivered during the longer-term time frame of your planning cycle.

You may be thinking, “That’s very nice, but if you are committing to features a year in advance, how do you maintain agility?”  Great question. Thanks for asking. At each PI Planning session (roughly quarterly), adjust the plan based on your evolving understanding of the level of effort required to develop each feature, as well as changes in resources or business priorities, or new technical dependencies.  

Doing this in PI planning allows all stakeholders to contribute and helps you obtain their buy-in. Also, be sure to communicate frequently with executive leadership, and set the expectation that plans will evolve. This will help adjustments be viewed as a positive demonstration of your flexibility, and not as an indictment of your long-term plans.

Striking a balance between the known and unknown, the possible and the desirable, speed and caution is never easy. But having an established method for considering the trade-offs, and communicating them in forms that all parties understand, goes a long way to creating value and successful outcomes. And ultimately, that’s what finding balance is for.