There is a lot of discussion about Agile vs. Plan Driven software development methodologies - usually driven by advocates of one or the other. Certainly, it's a more complex topic and there is a wide spectrum of extremely structured, plan-driven approaches to extremely agile, change embracing approaches. One well thought-out and nuanced explanation with advice for choosing where on the continuum to try to be can be found here.
Two concepts are fairly easy to accept and understand - one is that when you need to coordinate many different parties a more planned approach with more formal communication between the parties is essential. This comes in to play when coordinating marketing campaigns, customer roll-outs, contracts with vendors, and corporate funding approval processes. In all of these cases you need to have an idea of how long an effort will take and how much it will cost - and all of the stakeholders involved need to be formally updated to changes in the overall timeline or cost . This can form the basis of the overall planned Program at a high level.
The second is that at a lower level of detail, and especially with new product development, it is impossible to formally plan the software development with any degree of accuracy regarding how long each feature will take or whether every scalability and performance metric will be achieved by the first, second, or third attempt. Additionally, the new product development implementation process is really a R&D process, not a defined engineering approach. You need to explore whether customers can understand the new product, whether the new UI makes sense, whether the most anticipated features are actually used, and on and on. As part of your new product conceptualization, you need to prototyp, build, and let customers work with the software to learn what is really needed in the product. Josh Green, the CEO of Panjiva, explained it well during his presentation at the Information Industry Summit this week:
When we showed Panjiva to our first customers, we expected them to be blown away - we were giving them more data, more easily to use than they ever had before. But they kept asking for more data or asking for the data to be shown differently. After a while I realized that my customers were TEACHING US HOW THE PRODUCT SHOULD REALY WORK!
This is the essential point about truly new product development - it is an exploration. No one can completely specify in advance how the product should be implemented. Users will teach you how to make the software better. But users can only teach you when they react to something that you put in front of them. Iterative development, and especially early prototyping and mock-ups are key to enabling this customer feedback loop. It is imperative to learn from your customers and deliver the next version quickly so that they continue to see the improvements and continue to help you make your product better.
At the same time, you probably need a Program level plan - how much funding do you have? How many iterations can you afford? What conferences or industry events make sense to demo your software at?
So you see, it's not always either Planned or Agile, it's often "both."
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