Ideas Behind Agile Planning: Speedy

General George Patton said: “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

Part of this is an acceptance that all plans are imperfect and are based on incomplete information, including incomplete information about the future.

We do the best we can to plan in a quick time-box, and then we execute. In or from that execution we learn new information that guides us toward the revisions to the next plan. So, at least one cycles of Plan – Do – Check – Act should be rather short.

In Agile, we think of at least three (or normally at least three) cycles: The Day, the Sprint (maybe 2 weeks), and the Release (maybe 3-6 Sprints). (Yes, there can be other higher-level cycles also.)

We might consciously revise The Day’s plan, but we will revise the Sprint Plan (a.k.a., initially, the Sprint Backlog) and the Release Plan many times—possibly as often as on a daily basis.

So, planning must be done in a way where those plans can be easily revised.

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