Planning Granularity
Large projects require some planning ahead. Many companies and teams also like to do annual or quarterly planning. In this, considerable time and effort are invested in preparing for execution, laying everything out in detail, often down to what should be achieved in individual sprints. That’s two-week windows several months out, from the perspective of the planning event.
Does that really sound realistic?
Sure enough, the meticulously arranged activities nailed down in quarterly or annual planning usually don’t play out. Reality has a different opinion, or, it simply takes place.
When having a long-term objective in mind, it does make sense to plan how to get there. Plans should be coarser the farther in the future the steps one looks at to plan are. It just saves a lot of time to not be too detailed on things that are likely to change anyway.
What should be planned in more detail is the next few concrete steps. Restricting fine-grained planning to that, and still bearing in mind that the plan might just not work out, saves a lot of frustration.
It requires some tolerance for ambiguity to work like that.
(Also, this, for more details and insight.)
Tags: work