You don’t have all the time in the world

There are many wrong reasons why you would start working in an Agile fashion. Because everybody else is doing it, because your team is a bunch of hippie anarchists, because you like working with JIRA…

A good reason, however, is to deliver value faster. You see, you don’t have all the time in the world. They say ‘life is what happens while you’re making other plans’. This certainly applies to software development. Think of all the software projects you have been involved in over the course of your career. And now think of the one that got delivered exactly as planned, on time, in full. If the timeline spanned more than a couple of weeks I bet either scope or time (or both) have been affected negatively.

We don’t know what we can’t know

Why is that? It’s because we don’t know what we can’t know. Traditionally in software development most of the analysis is done upfront. We have the urge to want to understand the whole thing before we can build it properly. The thing is, most of the time (although we kid ourselves otherwise) we don’t know everything before we start. Resulting in broken promises to stakeholders, scope creep and consequently a lot of delays.

Meanwhile, your competitors are creeping up on you or even get ahead of you. Not because they knew what they were going to build and beat you to it. Most of the time they were Agile enough to learn from their mistakes (or yours for that matter) and because they didn’t have the whole thing planned.

Embrace uncertainty

Your competitor embraced the uncertainty and planned for it. A multi-quarter planning gives your team a fake sense of security that you should get rid of. Nothing feels as safe as planning for something that you only need to deliver months from now. It’s also the biggest lie a lot of teams trick themselves into believing.

Rather: make your roadmap dynamic. Spend a couple of days dreaming up future scenarios and alternative realities that could potentially happen. Do some storymapping, draw up some canvases (business model, lean or otherwise). Don’t go into details. But shape the universe that is your market. What is the current state, where can you go first and what is the long term goal. Make several versions of this and embrace the uncertainty that things might not turn out the way you think.

Then: stop fantasizing and decide. Decide what you are doing first and what you are definitely not doing right now. Make an assumption (best based on evidence from your market of course) what your focus is going to be. And stick to it as long as it makes sense. That is what it means to be Agile: have a plan, but stick to it as long as it makes sense. And be ready for the moment when it doesn’t.

Agile roadmap

It’s not because you can’t know everything that it doesn’t make sense to make a plan. You know your customers, you know your market and you’re definitely keeping a good eye on your competitors. As a rule of thumb I recommend planning in detail for the foreseeable future. This is usually a matter of weeks, maybe months, never longer than a quarter. Beyond that you can put a certain focus, some goals you want to achieve, but you won’t be able to flesh out all the details. Keep your plans and alternative realities at hand, but refrain from using them unless your market tells you to. Don’t forget you’re doing this to deliver value faster. So keep the focus on short term delivery and learn from the reactions on your product.

Agile time management and putting together a proper roadmap are stories for another day and probably worth their own featured article. At Daxe we can also help your team with setting these up. For now, remember that the reality is that there are things you don’t know and can’t plan for. So plan for the future, act in the short term and learn. It will help you to deliver software faster because you kept your focus limited. It might be that the first time(s) around the value doesn’t get delivered. You created something that your customers didn’t need. At least you know in a matter of weeks and avoid making products like this.

If you deliver software sooner you will also deliver valuable software sooner. In today’s competitive marketplace that’s what you should never forget.