There are many misconceptions organizations fall prey to as they move from traditional predictive project management practices to agile product delivery practices. Some of these misconceptions are:
“We don’t need documentation, we’re agile!”
“We can’t tell you what you are going get until we deliver, we’re agile!”
“We don’t need to plan, we’re agile!”
While many of these misconceptions are resolved early in an organization’s agile transformation through training and coaching, I often experience one misconception that often goes unaddressed long into an agile transformation.
“We don’t need risk management, we’re agile!”
This misconception is not always said out loud but is demonstrated in the organization’s execution of an agile framework.
That was from Tony Curington over at AiDA, “Risk Remains, Even with Agile!!!” Not that the author is against agile, but against what I might call naive agile. Here’s more:
The key difference and often the reason for the misconception regarding risk management in agile, is the inherent ability to identify and manage risk quickly as a part of the iterative and incremental nature of the Scrum framework. In fact, the 2020 Scrum Guide explains as part of its foundational theory, “Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and to control risk (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). This implies that by simply following the framework, risk will be managed.
That’s exactly the point. When a team partitions tasks and handles them iteratively, there should be increased definition about what will be done next and less discretion in terms of hand-waving planning issues.
I liken it to the central planner’s often head critique of markets: there’s no planning, people are blundering away with business plans that conflict with each other and lead to a tremendous amount of waste and error. But that’s completely wrong. In a market economy, there’s actually FAR MORE PLANNING than in a centrally planned economy.
The question is who does the planning: (1) Bureaucrats who takes in data, performs some linear programming, and issues orders without understanding the context? Or (2) Entrepreneurs and folks responsible for execution at the lower levels? Indeed, when planning decisions are delegated, you enable far more planning because the ones working on the program are also the ones responsible for figuring it out.
Lengthy requirements documents and cost estimates and so forth do not minimize risk in a world of complexity and uncertainty. Indeed, the idea of “risk” management implies the “planners” already know what the distribution of likely outcomes is for every relevant action. That means it’s more of an engineering problem of defined parameters and known results than one of figuring out what to do.
So yes, planning is important. The question is: who does the planning, and what are their incentives to continuously plan? In a bureaucracy, of course, people don’t hold any of the upside for their accomplishments, which may impact agile planning relative to the private sector. That’s a big issue.
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