The Agile

Yet again Kimota94 describes something that I feel I must comment on at length, rather than pollute his nice comments with my long-winded explanations. In this post, he comments on something that happens around forecasting.

I feel that there are two areas where the company has had trouble changing - the first being the idea of top-down description of what exactly needs to be done and second the issue described, forecasting versus planning.

Really these two items are closely related. Anthropomorphizing for a moment, the company is like a person who make rigid plans for going to see a movie: leave home 5:45, dinner start at 6, theater by 7, see {insert favorite current flick here} and home by 10. The more Agile company would be more like the person who says "let's see a movie tonight and catch a bite to eat." They meat (meet?) at the restaurant, go to theater and find the film is sold out, etc etc.

The second person is one that starts with general plans, but only fixes the items that absolutely require it. More easy-going, shall we say. The first person is one that must have every detail planned out, but suffers if circumstances change.

The "old way" was one where the implementors where told about the plan and told when things needed to be done, and what those things were. This is both the "top-down" sense and the "detailed planning" sense. I believe that the Agile ideal would be that vague ideas of what and when would be handed down, but then refinements would occur driven by the implementors. New circumstances would be presented from the "top" (customers, managers, etc) but details are established through dialog. The forecasting would be similarly vague because the implementors haven't driven through the details yet.

Note that these are the sleepy ideas of one who is typing mainly because stopping would be sleeping, so if it doesn't always make sense, it's not you.

The summary: everyone has to start finding out more answers rather than wait for them to be delivered (minimize the top-down-ness) and our partners (customers) need to be okay with vague plans a few months out.