So much of the planning I see in organizations is way overdone. Senior leaders still try to plan the project portfolio for a year. Product leaders are supposed to “commit” to year-long or longer roadmaps. And so many teams know “exactly” what they're supposed to do for weeks, if not months at a time.
We don't have to plan this much at work. I know this because I've run my own business for 30 years. And I've navigated money and personal goal planning since I started to work.
Here's how I think about all the planning we think we need:
- We need overarching long-term goals. For humans, that's about saving for retirement. For companies, that's about the customers we want to attract and the problems we want to solve for them. Yes, that's about strategy.
- We also need medium-term goals and deliverables. For humans, that's the ability to save for a home and send kids to college. For companies, that's about yearly and quarterly sales and revenue. With medium-term goals, we can choose relatively short deliverables or create experiments. These are product goals.
- Finally, we need short-term deliverables, things we can accomplish this week or next week.
I prefer to think top-down, so I often start with the overarching goal. That allows me to define a strategy and create the project portfolio.
But, sometimes, I have to start with this idea: What's the smallest thing I can do to see where I want to go next? That's the short-term deliverable.
I am sure some of you start with product goals because you have a feeling or a little data about the benefits of doing this product now.
But it doesn't matter which level you choose to start. It matters that you use all three planning loops.
Use Planning Loops Often
We all use these three planning loops to achieve our personal goals. And, when something surprises you personally, you replan. It might be good, as in winning the lottery. That allows you to rethink your long-term and medium-term goals. And what you need do do right now.
Unfortunately, bad news surprises us too often. That's when we rethink what we do right now, so we can still maintain those medium- and long-term goals. We use all three planning loops in rolling-wave plans.
However, none of us wait for the end of a quarter or the end of the year to replan. We replan now, and replan often—as needed. With surprises, our rolling waves might have a different cadence than our normal cadence.
We can do the same in our organizations.
We don't need huge, months- and years-long plans. Instead, we need the adaptability to replan as fast as possible.
That means the inner loop of the short-term deliverables has to be fast. While most of us think about team deliverables here, we also need to consider management deliverables—decisions. (See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.) The faster managers make challenging decisions, the faster the teams and product leaders can reimagine the value the product needs to deliver. (I've written a little about this before, in Product Roles, Part 4: Product Orientation and the Role of Projects.)
The more surprises we have, or the more agility we want, the more often we can replan.
That makes each planning session (for strategy, product goals, or team deliverables) much shorter. However, we need more of those planning sessions.
Plan for Organizations the Way We Plan for Ourselves
We don't need to do all this long, involved, and painful planning for our organizations. Instead, we can plan for our organizations the same way we plan for ourselves.
We commit to a strategy, that overarching goal, not specific tactics. Then, we create goals for the medium term, so we can see if that strategy works. Finally, we deliver incrementally, daily, with any luck, and check that deliverable against the various goals and strategy.
Once we get into the work, we might discover that we have to work from the bottom up. (I write books like this. I always start with the overarching strategy and as I write paragraphs and chapters, I refine the strategy and the goal. Your products are not like my books, but they are more alike than they are different.)
We don't need to spend a ton of time and “commit” to work very early. Instead, we can use rolling wave planning at all levels, to deliver and replan the strategy, the product goals, and the deliverables.
We do this in our personal lives. Why not at work?