Bringing certainty to a project is one of the prime goals of project management. Conventionally, teams were relying on experts to predict the delivery. Experts provide estimates to plan and schedule and thus to bring certainty. It is very crucial particularly in a very dynamically changing market conditions. However, these predicted estimations by experts are merely as good as the expert himself. The predicted estimates from an expert comes with all the limitation of this expert himself. It is also true that the no expert could be smart enough to predict the outcome of a project in which is impacted by both internal and external factors like, changing requirements, changing team dynamics (particularly addition and removal of team members) and changing technical frameworks etc.
On the other hand, there is one more endeavor pursuing to bring certainty. Adaption in the place of prediction. Adaption is the process of learning from past and taking a suitable stance to avoid repeating the same mistake. Humanity evolved by Adaption. Every food in our table came to our table after trying many wrong things and inferring the right food.
Instead of relying on experts' predictions, the Agile teams follow Adaption by trying unknown things at the earliest and failing quickly to get feedback to learn. This Adaption needs iterative model to apply the learning before trying next requirement. It is crucial that teams take small steps at a time, to avoid lot of time in something they don't know. So they these iterations should be small. Hence Adaption process should be early, small and frequent to learn fast and evolve.
Conventional expert estimates and plans are done only once, during the initial phase of projects. But the Adaption enables the team to revisit the estimates and hence the plan, during each iteration, which is extremely suitable for a dynamically changing environment. More than that, when we enable teams to estimate their requirements, we can get more realistic, time sensitive, team specific estimates. Also, these adaptive estimations are valid only for that specific team, in that specific organization, during that specific phase of project,for that particular client only. Please note the expert's estimations are valid are considered universal.
Estimations by experts are done in person days, and the adaptive estimations are done in story points.
On the other hand, there is one more endeavor pursuing to bring certainty. Adaption in the place of prediction. Adaption is the process of learning from past and taking a suitable stance to avoid repeating the same mistake. Humanity evolved by Adaption. Every food in our table came to our table after trying many wrong things and inferring the right food.
Instead of relying on experts' predictions, the Agile teams follow Adaption by trying unknown things at the earliest and failing quickly to get feedback to learn. This Adaption needs iterative model to apply the learning before trying next requirement. It is crucial that teams take small steps at a time, to avoid lot of time in something they don't know. So they these iterations should be small. Hence Adaption process should be early, small and frequent to learn fast and evolve.
Conventional expert estimates and plans are done only once, during the initial phase of projects. But the Adaption enables the team to revisit the estimates and hence the plan, during each iteration, which is extremely suitable for a dynamically changing environment. More than that, when we enable teams to estimate their requirements, we can get more realistic, time sensitive, team specific estimates. Also, these adaptive estimations are valid only for that specific team, in that specific organization, during that specific phase of project,for that particular client only. Please note the expert's estimations are valid are considered universal.
Estimations by experts are done in person days, and the adaptive estimations are done in story points.
