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When Does Planning Stop Adding Value?

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Zakaria Botros
Community Champion
Project Manager | Driving Clean Energy Innovations for a Sustainable Future| Canadian Nuclear Laboratories Ontario, Canada

We often say “failing to plan is planning to fail.” But in real projects, there’s also a point where planning starts to slow progress instead of enabling it. So I’m curious:

How do you personally recognize when planning is still adding value — versus when it’s time to move and adapt?

Is it a feeling, a metric, or experience?
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Aung Sint
Community Champion
Lead Consultant| Laminar Projects
In my experience, planning stops adding value when it no longer drives decisions or informs action.

A plan should help teams understand what matters, what is at risk, and what needs to change — once it becomes focused on maintaining accuracy rather than enabling delivery, the value drops.

It’s less a single metric and more a set of signals — when updates don’t change conversations, and when effort goes into defending the plan instead of using it.
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Lissette Indhira Pimentel Sosa
Community Champion
Program Manager| HARPER SRL Santo Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Planning stops adding value when it’s no longer influencing decisions.

If updates don’t change priorities, trigger actions, or surface new risks, then it’s probably time to move forward and adapt. At that point, the focus shifts from refining the plan to learning from execution.
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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
Planning is a continuous activity no matter the life cycle you are using. People can find more about that when check things like Barry Boehm´s Cone of Uncertainty.
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Priyanka Kathiresan Digital Project Manager| Enstoa Boston, MA, United States
The first round of planning should always be timeboxed, perfectionism in planning is its own form of procrastination. Start moving at 70% ready and improve as you go.
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Aaron Porter
Community Champion
IT Director| Blade HQ Payson, UT, United States
Who is defining the value? What is their tolerance for precision vs action? What is the tolerance for ambiguity?

To Sergio Luis Conte's point, planning never ends, so it becomes a matter of being able to determine when you have enough of a plan, enough information, to start acting and making effective decisions. This is going to vary, depending upon the nature of the work you're doing, and will look very different if you are building a software prototype versus deploying enterprise software versus building a high-rise office building, for example.
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Srikana Ray
Community Champion
IT Project Manager
Planning adds value when it leads to outcome or a solution, like making decisions, defining next steps, identifying risks to manage or resolving existing issues. Planning in collaboration with a team can improve clarity and help address challenges more effectively by bringing in diverse perspectives.

I think planning is both an experience and a discipline, when done for the right reasons, it can yield measurable results in terms of progress, alignment and risk reduction.

However, when planning does not result in any meaningful improvement, no new decisions, nor actions, we need to re-evaluate the planning done as it may no longer be adding value and can start to hinder progress.

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