Regardless of whether you work inside an organization or you work for yourself, the start of the new year allows all of us to reset and restart. That means too many of us think we need to “plan” for an entire year.
Before you consider an entire year, reflect on last year: How much of your original plan survived the entire year?
If you're like me, not much. Not because I didn't deliver on my original plans, but because the world changed. Even better, I discovered options I did not realize I had.
That's why I plan for change. And I expect this coming year we will all need to plan for many changes.
Why We Need to Plan for Change
Every year brings changes. And this year? With the coming US presidential election, the two current wars, and the various IP challenges to AI? Even though I'm a terrible predictor, I can predict we will have many changes that we cannot foresee.
The only thing we can foresee is that we will have to change—and probably more often than we wish to change.
So how can we plan for change? The first part is to clarify the current strategy.
Clarify Strategy
A good strategy explains the kinds of problems you solve for specific customers. Small- to medium-sized organizations often have a coherent set of customers with specific problems. Those organizations can define their strategy without too much trouble. They can say:
- We want to attract and retain these kinds of customers and solve those kinds of problems for those people.
- Given our current staffing, we can afford to fund these specific projects for some amount of time before those projects release their products and services. (See the first deliverable idea below.)
- Depending on how much innovation we require, we want to replan the portfolio after some releasing so we can learn.
Too often, very large organizations have divisions or departments that do not coalesce around a single coherent product. Those organizations will have to change their perspectives from “down” to each product before they can go “up” to the department. But the key is this: Every division or the entire organization needs a single, overarching goal that reflects that strategy. That goal is to acquire and retain more customers. (That's the only reason to define a strategy.)
However you define your strategy, that strategy says, “Here's our first deliverable that we need. That deliverable will allow us to replan based on our current information.”
Strategy is not sufficient. We need operational feedback loops to consistently verify we're headed where we want to go. (See the Multiple Short Feedback Loops Support Innovation and Feedback Loops Help When to Centralize or Decentralize Product-Based Decisions for more ideas about feedback loops and decisions.)
That means we need operational excellence, to create and deliver those small deliverables.
Create and Deliver Small Deliverables
I use several ideas for small deliverables, always working through the architecture.
- One-day stories. Very few teams understand how to do small stories, so it's fine if they pair, swarm, or mob to finish the work. However, the idea is to finish that work in one or two days.
- Generate useful feedback first, before delivering “all” of the feature. See Consider Product Options with Minimum Outcomes.
- Use “how little” thinking before you even start planning for the various feature sets.
The more smaller deliverables, the more information we have to inform our next set of plans. That's where rolling wave planning with options works to help us change. See the roadmap series starting with Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 3, Flow-Based Roadmapping to see how to integration options into your various roadmaps.
The more decisions points you can create, the more you can integrate short-term thinking that delivers on that strategy you defined.
Short-Term Thinking Plus Options vs. Long-Term Plans
How much uncertainty and ambiguity do you expect for your work? The more ambiguity, the shorter your rolling wave needs to be. (And the smaller your stories.) In addition, the lower your WIP needs to be, so you can complete something useful before external events force you to change. (I much prefer to choose my changes.)
Long roadmaps create a false sense of long-term thinking. Instead, they create short-term thinking with long-term decisions. Even this one-quarter roadmap on the left assumes we can predict the options for an entire quarter. That's not what I see.
Why do I say this is short-term thinking? Because we take what we know at the start of a given quarter and plan for the entire quarter. While a quarter is better than a year, it's still long-term thinking. Especially if we want to focus on acquiring and retaining customers, the point of clarifying our strategy.
But while that much planning looks as if it's long-term thinking, it's not. It's actually short-term thinking. It's short-term because we fool ourselves into thinking we can predict everything for an entire year.
Instead of planning for an entire year, what if we made more flexible, adaptable plans? Always focused on acquiring and retaining customers? With a clear strategy, we can. And that means we can look for options and serendipity.
Options Helped Me Write and Deliver a New Book
By design, I have a one-person business. That means I don't need a ton of clients every year, but I do want to work with several clients over the course of a year.
One question my clients continued to ask was this: “Can you help us create ‘our' agile approach?” I offered the ideas in Create Your Successful Agile Project, but these clients and I realized their culture would never support a “real” agile approach. However, they could use the ideas of increasing agility at all levels, as they worked through their culture challenges.
That's why I wrote Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility. (And these clients are very happy I did.)
There is no way I could have planned to write another nonfiction book last year. I did choose to postpone some fiction writing in order to do so, and I am satisfied with that decision.
Because I use small deliverables with rolling wave planning and I know my strategy, I could replan. I don't normally start a book at the end of the summer, but my clients needed this book. (I suspect more of you do, too!)
Plan for Change
I have never seen a year's worth of detailed planning work. I'm sure some of you have, and that's great. But for those of us who cannot plan in detail for a year, don't worry. Here's what I do:
- Clarify your strategy, especially who your customers are and the problems you want to solve for them.
- Create small deliverables that allow you to make progress to that strategy.
- Use relatively short rolling waves of planning. I recommend not more than four weeks for a product backlog (including the roadmap), and less than a quarter of time for the portfolio.
- Create options and show where those decision points are, instead of more specifics in a roadmap or portfolio.
If you do, you can plan for change. And, you might even surprise yourself with new products and services. All because you didn't plan for too much and too long. Your reset and restart will work.