Planning for Change

People have come up to me recently and expressed a concern that I am losing control of my mental faculties. To emphasize this point they point to the fact that I keep talking about "planning" and yet I am also an advocate of Agile Development. The usual comment I get is "In Agile Development, you don't plan, you just do."

Ah, the misguided conceptions of youth. Contrary to what people believe, Agile Development does believe in planning, but they are not slaves to the planning process. I once worked for a Programme Manager from Chicago who was quite ... stubborn ... with regard to his belief that if it isn't on the project plan you don't do it. Needless to say we butted heads a number of times, with him always coming out on the winning side because he was the Programme Manager.

This caused a few problems with the client and the application, however, as we were never responding quickly enough to requests. Each time something new came up we had to revise the project plan to take this into account and then confer with the client about the correct project variance that this would cause and sign off on the change request. This process took a number of weeks to complete. We were as agile as a beached whale.

After a while, we figured out how to handle the Programme Manager: insert line items into the plan, that planned for change. Indeed, that is what any agile project should do. Yes, you need to have an overall plan as to what you are going to do and when you are going to do it, but you also need to plan for change. You need to understand that change is natural in a project and you should develop your plan, and work out, in advance, how to deal with change with the client.

Change management is just as important to the development of an application as it is to the ongoing maintenance of an application.