Comments on: Predictive Planning vs Adaptive Planning

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 21 May 2010 04:46:06 +0000

Joseph,
you’re lucky enough to live in a pure Scrum world. Those of us that are only in the beginning stages of the journey benefit from a post like this. You wouldn’t yell at a 6 month old baby for not being able to tie her shoes. Let us (babies) learn from this blog post. If you don’t like it, skip it.
Cheers.

By: David Alfaro

David Alfaro — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:58:17 +0000

I should not have said “Triangle of Iron”, but Agile Constrained Triangle, where the constraint of Scope is flexible, but time and cost are not. Agile says that Scope is flexible given the uncertainty of the technology used to build the product and business environment (that is, client clarification of what she wants). In those terms, Scope (Product Backlog) can change as long as cost and time are kept fixed.

And regarding the vision, if you don’t know where you want to go, nothing can save you. Agile says: “Where do you want to go? To that peak of the mountain? Ok, instead of planning up front every single step and move we have to do, we’ll take those decisions as we go, but certainly we have to have the skills to do it and the clear goal in order to reach it”.

By: Project Management Hut

Project Management Hut — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:08:55 +0000

The arguments against Srcum in the beginning of the article define the view that traditional Project Managers have about Scrum, and Agile in general.

I have lots of arguments against your list of “Why is this not a problem?”, but I would like to discuss #5 in particular.

You say that the customer has to be within the constraints of the iron triangle. Well, the bad thing is, 99% of the times, this is isn’t the case. Change requests often happen, and they do affect that triangle (anyway, even according to the PMBOK, that triangle is dead). Additionally, this statement “the vision wasn’t clear at the beginning of the project” is contradictory to why Scrum/Agile was first devised and applied, isn’t the whole purpose of Agile to be fluid enough to manage (software) projects where the customers usually don’t have a clear vision of what they want?

By: Andrej

Andrej — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:11:45 +0000

By: David Alfaro

David Alfaro — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:39:43 +0000

Thanks for the valuable observation Joseph, especially when I realize that the title I gave it doesn’t match very well with the content of the post
I am curious, how do you handle the type of real-life, dichotomic objections I discuss? Certainly the answer should be targeted to the value of agile rather than emphasizing the conflict between agile and traditional approaches.

By: Joseph Flahiff

Joseph Flahiff — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 05:44:35 +0000

Please no more “vs” articles. The market has moved so far beyond this type of comparison it is like people saying, “Web 2.0 is important”.
I am sorry to be so blunt but I am just tired of all of the comparison articles. There are enough of them. If someone wants to read and understand the difference between one and the other they have AMPLE articles to read. Please don’t add to the noise. Make some new thoughts, some new ideas, push the boundaries. This code is working, it doesn’t need more tweaking, it is good enough.
Oh BTW I am a Scrum Master have been doing scrum only projects for several years and am an agile coach.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:36:38 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by agilenature: #agile New blog post Predictive Planning vs Adaptive Planning http://bit.ly/5d3xVd...

By: Twitter Trackbacks for Predictive Planning vs Adaptive Planning » David Alfaro: Scrum Costa Rica [agilenature.com] on Topsy.com

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:35:08 +0000

[...] Predictive Planning vs Adaptive Planning » David Alfaro: Scrum Costa Rica agilenature.com/2009/12/04/predictive-planning-vs-adaptive-planning – view page – cached Predictive Planning vs Adaptive Planning [...]