What is your experience using rolling wave planning?
Al TaylorI.T. Contractor| IndependentWaterloo, Ontario, Canada
Are people using rolling wave planning successfully?
Is it a tough sell?....stakeholders often expect a GANTT chart showing the enitire project planned out from start to finish.
Saving Changes...
Sort By:
Elyse NielsenSenior Project Manager| Ascension Health Information ServicesHaines City, Fl, United States
Hi Al,
Unfortunately in my experience roll-wave planning was transformed into plan as you go. So I would offer this advice, I think roll wave planning is best with rollouts of department or unit by unit. For example, you may rollout a centralized general legder system to each individual office unit. For each unit, would review what the plan needed to be to bring that unit live.
Hans RobbersSenior Director| SalesforceVlissingen, Netherlands
Al
Thanks for bringing up this topic. I do think rolling wave planning offers a lot of value and a better planning than the total project planning.
To be able to sell it to the stakeholders I divide the project by milestones whereby I aim to have the milestones on a 4-6 weekly period. These milestones are communicated with the stakeholdersand reported against . In most cases the stakeholders are only interested in slippage.
I plan a period of 4 weeks ahead and every week a new week will be planned with activities which lead to the milestone. When an activiy slips it might impact the milestone. After two weeks of plannign in this way I do know how my team members plan and it will be easier to plan the work.
Budget control is wihin the period in a normal way and for the total project actuals plus the resource plan for the total project
Hopes this helps
Hans Saving Changes...
Andrew MakarProgram Manager| AMAKAR LLCOakland Township, Mi, United States
In practice and as an Agile enthusiast, I definitely recommend rolling planning. There is no way you can 100% guarantee the end date of your project will have the same scope and quality without it. For small projects 2-3 months, this may be easier to do. In large scale multi-year ERP implementations, rolling wave planning using release based plans is the way to go.
I recently completed a 2.5 year program and the scope of services changed significantly from Day 1 to Day 912. Each release was delivered in 5-8 month cycles that resulted in new functionality and new applications being launched with each release.
The strategic goals remained the same, but the scope and timeline needed to adjust based on business need and current program performance. During that time new acquisitions and divestitures occurred which had an impact on the program. Rolling planning was also useful in adjusting the scope as needed.
In one of Neal Whiten's books, he talks about rolling based commitments and never committing to an end date more that 6-8 weeks out. It can be a target or a goal, but the team can only commit to what they can realistically plan within a shorter planning horizon.
(That's also why Agile tends to work better for unknown or poorly defined requirements)
It is not possible for a person to create a 100% accurate plan! Then how an effective PM create a plan and meet the schedules? He creates an initial plan after discussing with the team. In the middle of the project if a task is delayed or a new task is added, then the PM looks into the activity diagram and finds a way to effectively utilize the slacks!
GANTT chart mostly remains the same, even after the PM tweaking the activity diagram to include some more tasks.
"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining."
