Activities Versus Achievements

Classical planning is based on activities. Once the key activities are identified, then resources are assigned, effort and duration are estimated, and a sequence is created. The problem with this approach for an agile project is that it is based on the team's ability to accurately identify all of the activities in the project. For projects that have been done many times before, it is relatively easy to identify the major activities, and in fact, these projects often start out their planning effort with a template from the previous project. For projects on the technology development end of the spectrum, it's quite a different story.

Agile Strategy

When planning an agile project, ask team members to identify the achievements or milestones required to complete the project, rather than the detailed tasks.

Projects that operate on the edge of new technology tend to take a zigzag course toward their destination (see Figure 7-1). The technical leaders know the general direction they must go and the sequence of milestones that must be achieved. What they don't usually know is the exact path or pathways that they will take. For these reasons, it is somewhat impractical to attempt to construct a timeline based on activities. An attempt to do so may backfire by frustrating everyone in volved. A more practical approach is to construct your timeline based on achievements, since those are the things that the technical team will be focused on (see Figure 7-2). This is a subtle but critical difference between planning using agile methods versus classical methods.

Figure 7-1: Projects that operate on the edge of technology tend to take a zigzag course toward their objectives.

Figure 7-2: The basis of timelines in an agile versus classic environment.

The upside of activity-based planning is that you are able to mechanically capture, fairly accurately, both the sequence and duration dimensions of your timeline. While achievement-based planning only captures the sequence dimension, in the agile environment, achievements (or milestones) are made up of several yet-to-be-defined activities, and because there are multiple possible pathways leading to each achievement, there is no mechanical method to construct a good bottom-up time estimate. This leaves us with the top-down method for estimating duration, which works rather well for an experienced team. I've found that technical people, while often resistant to formal project management, are actually very good at estimating durations of achievements. They don't like the restrictions associated with committing to a specific sequence of activities since they know that sequence will change. However, they will commit to achieving a milestone in a certain amount of time if you don't bother them too much with how they are going to do it (see Figure 7-3).

Figure 7-3: The basis of activity durations in an agile versus classic environment.

Agile Strategy

Use the top-down method for resource and duration estimation rather than the traditional bottom-up method.