Planning for different development approaches

All projects need planning, with no exception. Some people think that Agile project don’t need planning, which is not correct. They just have a different type of planning:

• Predictive projects have either a detailed or a high-level plan upfront. When the upfront plan is high-level, there would be cyclic (e.g., monthly) stages for detailing them.
• Adaptive projects have a really high-level plan upfront. Some level of detail may be added on various cycles during the project, but each element is fully detailed only before it’s executed.

Anything we do must have a purpose. We don’t plan for the sake of planning, but we do so to

1. direct the project, and
2. enable monitoring and controlling.

The first of these depends on the development approach while the second depends on the project management methodology. That’s why planning is not an isolated concept and why we can’t judge how good a plan is without checking the development approach and the management methodology. Something that might be a good plan in one setup may not be so in another.