The New Eternal Dilemma

Today left no doubt in my mind that we've got yet another big challenge ahead of us in our pursuit of Going Agile: figuring out how to get everyone on-side with the idea of forecasting, rather than planning. I sat in a meeting today in which it was painfully obvious that some folks just don't want to let go of the notion of having a medium- to long-range plan that they can comfortably stand behind. And it's not like it's their faul for feeling that way: they're the ones having to face customers and corporate parents and say, "Here's our plan for the next couple of weeks, and here's a forecast for what the months after that might look like" when what they're expected to say is, "Here's our plan for the next several months and we guarantee we'll deliver everything it says here by that date there." After all, we - and thousands of companies like ours - have been doing that for years. And history shows that we usually come up short, either in terms of delivering less than we promised, or delivering it late - or both! Which is one of the issues Agile is supposed to tackle: don't pretend that a big project can be planned with any certainty upfront, but instead focus on delivering as much as you can, frequently, in the order which provides the customer the greatest value.

So there I sat, hearing plans being made for the next four months, and much serious consideration of when features would come out, having been forecasted by product owners using Story Points and guessing at velocities! I finally said my piece, which was that it was silly to treat a forecast as anything other than a guess, and that what we really needed was a strictly-prioritized list of feature requests, so that what we would be able to guarantee is that we'll have delivered as many of the right features as we could, by the time such-and-such a date came around. Some of the people got it, but to others I suspect this sounded like a cop-out. Like, we could actually figure out exactly what would come out when, but we just don't feel like it!

And these are the sorts of things that give Agile Managers (more) grey hairs...