4 Asking the right questions
This chapter covers:
- How to use knowledge of the “dark arts” of project planning and management to benefit the practice of Agile
- How to use lines of communication with your colleagues to collect planning information
- How to use aspects of waterfall style project planning to create concise planning notes
- How to use planning information to estimate project feasibility
- How to create milestones that help organize interactions with colleagues outside the project team
- How to handle cases where preliminary planning indicates a project is inadvisable
Open lanes of communication with key areas of the organization outside the project team are required for a project to be successful. Now an Agile project manager needs to ask the right questions, and communicate the right information to their colleagues.
Agile is intentionally adaptive. However, Agile is not very predictive beyond the short time horizons of implementation iterations. Over the course of a project, project teams may acquire enough experience to feed into an analysis of how the team is performing within the project. But, even with experience-based analysis, software tasks remain unique and therefore hard to measure and compare. It is never too late for surprises in software development.