What's the role of Planning? Planning of any sort? Full on DoD 5000.2 Program Life Cycle planning? Or XP planning game played every other week with the small group of developers and the customer in the same room?
Planning looks forward, in to the future. Planning looks at what needs to happen, what could happen, and what actions need to take place if any of those two things were to happen.
One concept missing from many discussions about planning is what does done look like? The agilest will tell us that "done" emerges from the development process. This of course is not true nor actually possible - event in the simplest of projects. Unless you're spending your own money doing artistic work would an unplanned expenditure of time and money be possible. Even the greatest artist has a "vision" of what "done" looked like.
So why all the resistance to Planning? This is not just resistance from those claiming project management is not necessary in their special methodology. I encounter this resistance on large complex programs as well. "We're too busy doing real work to work on plans and schedules," is a common response.
Some times it actually is a matter of "not enough time." But there is something else here. A natural resistance to defining outcomes, committing to the actions needed to make those outcomes appear - in some form, and the accountability to those commitments.
Ask one of our 18 year olds, "when are you coming home from the movies?" "Gee Dad I don't know yet, it depends on what we do after the movie." The teenagers in our house have a planning horizon of about 2 hours. That's how they view the world at times. At other times the horizon is much longer. The college application essay has been worked on for several months now. Cross Country practices are planned a month ahead with specific training intervals.
The concept of a planning horizon can be used to guide the planning need:
- How long are you willing to wait before you discover that the current activities are not producing what you wanted in terms of desirable outcomes?
- By the way, what are those desirable outcomes? Be they "fun" on the Pearl Street Mall, better climbing muscles for the upcoming Century ride, a software feature requested by the customer, or "being there, on time, on budget, and on spec" for the launch of the spacecraft? (Probably only the Pearl Street Mall "fun" is emergent.)
- How long are you willing to wait before you discover you are behind schedule and over budget or off spec for any of these things?
These type of questions need to be asked when someone pushes back on the planning - and the supporting scheduling - processes.