In management circles, the General Dwight D. Eisenhower quote “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable,” is often heard.  In non-Agile organizations, the project planning phase can extend for months without yielding a single deliverable with business value. In smaller organizations, chaos reigns as project teams work on multiple projects -- without a clear understanding of competing resources requests and dependencies.

At first, the quote might seem to be a contradiction, but when put under the lens of execution, there’s a lot of truth there.  In Agile circles, this quote is also reflected in agile practices as teams implement multiple levels of planning including product roadmap, release and iteration planning.  Agile techniques are often misrepresented as having a lack of planning, when in reality, agile techniques provide more planning and retrospect opportunities than a traditional waterfall project.  Plans set an initial direction, but the real results are found in project execution.

The following quote from an article on the Sticky Branding blog links the importance of execution with planning:

“Plans are just plans until you implement them. Your success is directly linked to how well you can execute your strategy.  Planning supports execution. When you plan with your team on a regular basis, it creates buy-in, but more importantly it provides accountability.”

- Jim Stewart, ProfitPath

Agile teams improve their project delivery with each sprint by incorporating ongoing planning and retrospectives into the software delivery process. Even waterfall projects can benefit from adopting several of the collaborative project management practices found within the Agile mindset.

Adopting a collaborative project management approach can eliminate project vacuums and are key to ensuring greater success. Here are a few keys to add more collaborative project management to your team.

Don’t Put Project Planning in a Vacuum
A project plan that exists in a vacuum is useless, but an active plan that is integrated into a collaborative project environment is indispensable.  Agile supports active planning through its multiple levels of planning (product roadmap, release and iteration) and incorporates frequent feedback through its iterations, releases and project retrospectives. 

The collaboration among product owners and the development team encourages a continual feedback loop to improve project delivery.  Lessons learned from one iteration are quickly applied to the next iteration plan rather than waiting until the end of the project.

In a classic “Command and Control” project management environment, a project manager develops a complex schedule of activities and dependencies that are assigned to project team members. (These tasks may or may not incorporate actual team member feedback.)

Agile teams avoid the “Command and Control” model and adopt team collaboration to ensure project planning isn’t conducted in a vacuum so all can benefit from a collaborative mindset.  By favoring human interactions, customer collaboration (and communication) over the “Command and Control” model with dictated plans, non-value add processes, project teams can break out from the planning vacuum.

Inject the Collaborative Project Mindset
In pure Scrum teams, there isn’t a “project manager”.  A Scrum Master will coach multiple projects on best practices, but the project team is designed to be self-directing and self-managing. The development team and the product owner collaborate on how to organize the team, identify the tasks and take appropriate action.

Agile teams recognize collaborative project planning should be a team effort rather than an individual one.    By adopting a collaborative planning mindset, project teams improve their success by working with all project team members to obtain buy-in, refine tasks and develop realistic estimates based on the team’s expertise.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to conduct a collaborative planning session.  A project team can gather around a whiteboard or use a brainstorming app to identify all the relevant tasks to accomplish project deliverables.  Mike Cohn’s provides a free user story estimation tool (http://www.planningpoker.com) that improves estimation accuracy using collaborative discussion and teamwork.

Estimates can be gathered and the iteration tasks can be quickly created during the meeting.  The project team can use a range of tools to accomplish collaborative project planning, ranging from index cards to a collaborative project management platform.  

If the project team is using a collaborative project management platform, individual team members can create and organize their own tasks, prioritize the user stories and estimate the hours, story points or t-shirt sizes for their user stories.

At the task level, the teams will likely estimate in hours, but estimating in abstracts like story points or t-shirt sizes is useful for individual user stories or the larger stories known as epics.  (If you’re interested in learning more about Agile Estimation and the Cone of Uncertainty, check out http://agile101.net/2009/08/18/agile-estimation-and-the-cone-of-uncertainty/)

The benefit of the collaborative approach is that team members can quickly identify the tasks relevant to their user story and “true them up” with their own progress.  By using a shared collaborative platform, the project team can develop a meaningful iteration plan based on team input without relying on a single project lead in a “command and control” position.

Use Collaborative Project Updates
Another benefit of a collaborative project management platform is the time saved updating the iteration schedule.  An iteration schedule is comprised of the user stories and high level tasks required to develop the feature or function.

Since iteration is usually confined within two to four week fixed durations, there isn’t a need for minute level task tracking.  If a user story isn’t finished at the end of the iteration, the remaining user story can be included in the next iteration.

However, it is useful to assess how much work is remaining in a given user story so the effort can be factored into the next iteration.  Instead of having a project manager hunt down each team member for the actual hours spent on a task or trying to find out if 99% complete really means 99% complete, each team member updates their own iteration tasks as work is completed.

If they can answer the following two questions, the entire team will have a good understanding user story in the iteration plan:

1. How many hours have been spent on the task?
2. What is the best and worst case estimate of the remaining work?

By adopting this approach and leveraging communication, the project team collectively has a better understanding of how the current iteration’s progress impacts the team:

1. In a collaborative project management platform, when a user story is delayed that impacts another user story, the entire team can be notified and team members can take proactive action to rearrange work to accommodate the delay.
2. In a non-collaborative environment, the project team would wait from the project manager to identify the delay and provide direction to the team.
3. In a collaborative project management platform, the entire team benefits from the time saved developing, managing, and communicating changes to the project.  Teams can adopt a nimble project planning and execution approach that supports proactive decision-making rather than reactive responses.

Communicate the Burn Down Easily
The burn down chart is an effective tool to communicate the amount of work that needs to be completed before the end of a project. Burn down charts can be represented by story points, user story counts and even project hours.

In the figure below, the project collaboration platform provides a burn down chart in hours and uses a high, expected and low estimate line to identify remaining work.  Gaining visibility into project progress immediately without having to update a spreadsheet helps the team understand if they can complete the scope provided in the current iteration.

In classic, waterfall project execution, the administrative task of tracking progress and updating the project schedule falls on the project manager.   Since updating the schedule is not a project manager’s full time job, it usually falls to the side as they perform daily firefighting and coordination.  Unless the team builds in a schedule review meeting into their week, the project schedule usually sits on a file server never to be updated.

Only when a customer or executive asks for an updated plan does the PM scramble to mark items 100% complete and “green up” the project schedule.  Sound familiar?

If your team has adopted Agile practices, this situation should only be a faded memory.

Conclusion
Project plans and schedules are useful tools to help model future events.  However, ongoing planning is required during project execution to effectively deliver the project.  Project planning doesn’t stop with a single iteration and shouldn’t be done in a vacuum.

By adopting a collaborative project management, teams can see for themselves that Dwight was right. Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable!

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