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How we plan is as important as that we plan at all.
Outcome-based vs solution-based planning
How do you go about planning?
How, for example, do you plan a holiday? Do you decide on a destination, then figure out everything else when you get there? Or do you map out a rough list of places of interest, perhaps prioritise them and then tick them off during your stay? Or do you create a day-by-day itinerary of where you will be going and what you’ll be doing on every day of your stay?
How you go about planning a holiday can change your experience of that holiday, but it’s largely a matter of personal preference. If you like winging it, you’ll do the bare minimum of planning beforehand. If you are more detail-oriented, you’re more likely to want to know in advance what you’ll be doing each day and therefore what to pack.
But in agile teams, it’s not quite so straightforward. How we plan is important.
Do we create plans based on what we will do, or based on what we want to achieve?
For most of us, our natural inclination, when presented with a requirement from a user / customer / product owner, is to immediately start thinking about what we will need to do. Think of this as ‘solution-based planning’
