Phase 2 is what we call Active Planning.
This is really the breakthrough that gets you the best of both Agile and traditional project management. You see, the traditional approach tries to get a complete plan while there’s still too much uncertainty. You can’t analyze data that hasn’t emerged yet. Complex problems require active experimentation to get key details to become visible.
In Phase 2, teams often begin to build an early slice of the product. However, the goal isn’t just a “quick win.” Rather, the goal is to probe and learn about the core complexity of the initiative, ideally while making progress on the solution.
Active Planning usually involves one or more Scrum teams working on real features and user stories. But those features and stories are deliberately structured to emphasize the core complexity of the larger initiative. Often, these efforts are timeboxed to limit the size of the bet.
Active Planning involves more than “technical spikes.” It’s not just research. In this phase, we build to get more certainty in at least a few areas.
Is the proposed solution usable by our target customers? Valuable enough that they’d pay for it? Technically feasible? Likely to meet the business case? And an often-overlooked question: Is the solution feasible with our current org structure and practices?
In How Big Projects Get Done, megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg shows that most successful big projects bring far more iteration into planning. Take the animation studio Pixar, for example. They don’t script a perfect movie before production starts. They develop rough, “ugly early” versions and test them repeatedly, week after week, to refine the story. Frank Gehry, the architect behind some of the most stunning buildings in the world, doesn’t start with detailed blueprints. He goes through a process creating thousands of sketches and physical models, experimenting with form and structure before finalizing the design.
Bringing this type of agile iteration into the planning stage breaks the big conflicts between agile and more traditional waterfall, plan-driven projects.
