Want Organizational Agility? Plan Small, Decide Fast, and Replan Often (Part 3)
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
In the first article in this series, I suggested that organizational agility required a focus on adaptability and resilience. In the second article, I suggested that managers needed to collaborate, not compete. That’s a huge cultural change for many organizations.
This article is about how to plan small, decide fast and replan often. If you’re trying to use agility, you’ve probably done that at the team, project or program levels. But that’s not enough for organizational agility. Instead, agile organizations need to plan small, decide fast and replan as often as necessary to achieve organizational agility.
Way too few organizations can even consider that small and iterative planning for products and the portfolio. That’s because many organizations plan to address both product roadmaps and the project portfolio quarterly or yearly.
That’s not good enough when the world changes daily. Instead, we need to plan for days, weeks and months.
Short-term planning changes everything.
Let’s first examine why managers think long-term planning is efficient and useful. I’ll start with the efficiency argument.
Longer Planning Horizons Appear Efficient
I don’t know anyone who loves the product roadmap meetings or the project portfolio meetings. Those meetings often attempt to bring people across the organization …
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