Plan at Several Levels

How much certainty do you have about what your customers want? You might have certainty about some of the requirements for now. Most of the organizations I work with have some certainty about the next month or two, less certainty about the next couple of quarters, and not much certainty for the next few years. Agile and lean approaches help when you don’t have a lot of certainty about the requirements or the technical approach(es) that might work.

You might work in a different environment, where you have total certainty for the next several years. If so, you don’t need agile approaches for the requirements feedback. You might want to use agile approaches for seeing product progress and the team’s ability to release regularly.

Sometimes when you’re starting a new product or offering, you understand the strategic value of the features, but your certainty past the next week or two is quite low. You’re using agile and lean approaches to deliver value fast and be able to change as often as possible to respond to feedback.

We plan and replan at various levels when we use agile approaches. The organization can plan the project portfolio, the mixture of projects that will define the organization’s strategy. (For more about the project portfolio, see Manage Your Project Portfolio, Second Edition [Rot16a].)

Product managers (often with product owners) plan the product roadmap: what the product people want when. I often see six-quarter roadmaps that look like the top figure. This roadmap doesn’t have much detail, but it does show an external release every quarter. Some teams, when they start to use agile approaches, have trouble releasing even once a quarter.

While senior management and product management might be able to talk to customers about expected or hoped-for timing, a six-month roadmap (shown in the next figure) can show much more detail.

The six-month roadmap shows you the months, the external releases, the internal releases, and the feature sets the product management team hopes will be in the release. Roadmaps are hopes, not commitments.

Don’t worry if you can only create a one- or two-month detailed roadmap. When people try to plan in great detail, they tend to overplan. That creates waste. I run my business on an six-month big-picture roadmap and a one-month detailed roadmap. I update these roadmaps on a two-week rolling wave. (See ​Create Rolling-Wave Roadmaps​, for more details.)