This title has been posted before. It's good to remind yourself every once in awhile of the phrase. I'm headed to the nations capital during the inauguration to work a program as the Senior Risk Adviser. This position supports the Program Manager and his staff in the context of programmatic and technical risk.
This brings me to a quote:
Not only decision time, but recovery time for less than planned technical and programmatic performance.
Planning is Necessary but not sufficient, You have to Have a Credible Plan
An agile thought leaser once side in a quote in a book
which is course is completely wrong, "It isn't even right enough to be wrong," as Wolfgang Pauli says.
Plans are the strategy for the successful completion of the project. Success almost always means the delivery of the deliverables that provide the business value the customer ordered. So if you have a Plan, what are the risks that will prevent the successful delivery of the deliverables that represent the business value? What are the mitigation's and or retirement's of those risks? Are those mitigation's and or retirements budgeted, resourced, and scheduled? If not, you don't have a credible plan. In fact your Plan is now a risk unto itself.
If you follow the agile thought leaders advice "do the planning, but throw out the plans," you late and over budget before you start, and most likely the value you're trying to deliver is going to disappoint as well.
