Focus More on Adapting and Replanning Than on Conforming to a Plan

One of the issues on many product development efforts is that too much emphasis is placed on the up-front plan and not enough on continuous planning. If we spend significant time up front developing a highly predictive plan, and we believe we got it right, there will be significant inertia to conform to the plan instead of updating it to respond to change. If we believe instead, as we do with Scrum, that you can’t get the plans right up front and you can’t eliminate change, we will value responding to change and replanning over following the up-front plan.

In the 1980s I spent time either helping develop large plans or working as a consultant to companies that had developed such plans. You know the type of plans I’m talking about—the ones yielding a large Gantt chart that we print (across multiple pages), tape together, and hang on the wall (see Figure 14.2).