Progressive Elaboration

Contents 1 Overview 2 Importance 3 PMI-ACP Exam Outline Reference 4 Body 5 History 6 Current practice 7 See also 8 Sources & Reference 9 External Links

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Overview

Progressive elaboration involves continuously improving and detailing a plan as more detailed and specific information and more accurate estimates become available. Progressive elaboration allows a project management team to define work and manage it to a greater level of detail as the project evolves.

A simple way to think of it is "as we progress through the project, elaboration of more of the project-related details become more available". Thinking of it in this way, both, incorporate the language and reinforce the mindset of what Progressive Elaboration is all about.

Prototypes support the concept of progressive elaboration because they are used in iterative cycles of mock-up creation, user experimentation, feedback generation and prototype revision.

Rolling Wave Planning as a Type of Progressive Elaboration

Change Requests as a Result of Progressive Elaboration

Importance

PMI-ACP Exam Outline Reference

Body

History

Current practice

In agile approaches, progressive elaboration is achieved by short iterations or development cycles with a step of refining the backlog at the beginning of (and sometimes during) an iteration. In iterative projects, rolling wave planning is a common technique of progressive elaboration.

See also

Rolling Wave Planning

Sources & Reference

PMBOK, part 2, ch. 3, p. 565

External Links

Examples of progressive elaboration