Why Traditional Project Planning Often Fails

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Why Traditional Project Planning Often Fails

Doug DeCarlo, Principal, The Doug DeCarlo Group

September 4, 2007






A colleague of mine, Ravi Mohan, founder of ProjectScape once quipped, “Your project plan is obsolete even before you hit the print button.” Ravi was referring to traditional project planning as applied to software development projects.
 
I accepted his pronouncement as intuitively obvious and never gave it much more thought until the other day when I happened to be leafing through Mike Cohn’s excellent book, entitled Agile Estimating and Planning. (1)
 
Here’s a summary of Mike’s four reasons why traditional approaches to planning often fail:
 
1. Planning is by activity rather than by feature
In traditional approaches, work breakdown structures are based on activities.



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"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Winston Churchill