The ever elusive Continuous Planning

What does the term Continuous Planning even mean? Or is it dual track planning/agile or is it parallel tracks?

Trying a different format for this newsletter.

Whatever you call it, I’m talking about all the work that is continuously happening in parallel in the product development lifecycle.

• Most people have a hard time accomplishing a good balance.

• Teams feel pressured to NOT use waterfall

• But as a baseline, we feel comfortable working waterfall

• A big fallacy around Agile is that it will do away with sequential work

• Work still needs to happen sequentially

• Teams need to get comfortable with more than just 2 parallel tracks

• All work goes through 4 stages

  • Idea - Just a concept yet to be explored

  • Discovery - When we build up context and knowledge around the idea

  • Build - What has been matured, validated and prioritised as the right thing(s) to work on

  • Post launch - Gone live and we need to monitor and adapt if needed

• This doesn’t even touch on the details of the process

• We often get lost between Discovery and Build, and forget Post Launch

• We take on more than we can do because we focus mostly on the Build phase

• We will potentially have something on all 4 phases at the same time throughout the product management process

• Being Agile doesn’t mean jumping between all 4 constantly

• It’s a muscle that needs to be developed. Potentially the most important muscle

• If planning is done, only on a certain date, it won’t work

• When we are defining what to work on in the next quarter or sprint, it should be fully defined already. We should just need to prioritise.

• Often teams wait until the time to plan to mature many of the ideas

• This also happens because we’ve bogged down with many other tasks

• Should we be doing all those other tasks?

• What would happen if we didn’t do them? Would someone else step up? Would we discover it wasn’t important? Maybe

This issues was literally a brain dump of a train of thoughts and I’d be happy to dig into specific points on the topic if you, the reader feel it’s worthwhile. (Let me know)