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Adapting Over Conforming
Jim Highsmith
(August 27, 2009)
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Plans aren’t sacrosanct — they’re meant to be flexible guides, not straightjackets. Agile project leaders focus on adapting to inevitable changes rather than opposing them. In this way, value and quality are the end goals and the plan becomes a means to achieve them, not the goal itself.
Look at the definition of “success” from the Standish Group, which has published success (and failure) rates of software projects over a long period of time. Success, per the Standish Group, is “the project is completed on time and on budget, with all the features and functions originally specified.” This is not a value-based definition but a constraint-based one. Using this definition, then, project managers focus on following the plan with minimal changes. Colleague Rob Austin would classify this as a dysfunctional measurement — one that leads to the opposite behavior of what was intended.
When customer value and quality are the goals, then a plan becomes a means to achieve those goals, not the goal itself. The constraints embedded in those plans are still important; they still guide the project; we still want to understand variations from the plans, but — and this is a big but — plans are not sacrosanct; they are meant to be flexible; they are meant to be guides, not straightjackets.
Both traditional and agile leaders plan, and both spend a fair amount of time planning.
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