Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Roll With It
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.
Don't try to plan the whole darn project at the beginning. You'll be wasting time you could be spending removing obstacles so the project team can find its rhythm. Instead, use rolling-wave planning (and inch-pebbles) to make the most of your initial and ongoing scheduling and re-planning activities.
This is the second installment in a series of adapted excerpts from the author’s new book, Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf.
If you're accustomed to trying to schedule an entire project, rolling-wave planning might feel strange to you. You won't generate an entire Gantt chart or know exactly what you'll be doing three months from now. But honestly, how good are you at predicting the schedule that far out anyway? I'm not that good — things happen in a project. The further out the milestone, the less you know about exactly how you'll get there. Because no matter how good the project team's estimate was, some events will prevent them from completing the project the way they originally estimated.
A rolling-wave plan is a continuous detailed schedule that's only a few weeks long. As you complete one week of detailed schedule, you add another week to the end of the schedule. With a four-week rolling-wave schedule, you never have less than four weeks of …
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If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith. - Albert Einstein |