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After watching this video, you'll be able to articulate why upfront planning leads to missed

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deadlines and summarize why iterative planning leads to greater accuracy.

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Douglas Adams famously once said, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they

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make as they fly by. Whoosh! There goes another deadline." This happens to us all the time, we put a

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stake in the ground, and we miss it. The question is, why does this happen? But more importantly,

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what can we do to avoid it? I like to call this navigating the unknown, right? So if I told you

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that you need to navigate across this field of penguins, you know, you might look down

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at the bottom there and say, "Well, I can I can kind of put my foot here and and maybe step in

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and step around." But then when you get to the middle, like how do you plot a course to the other

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side? Oh, and by the way, the penguins are going to keep moving as you're moving through them a lot

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like software development, where the operating system is getting patched and patched. And

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packages are getting patched. And you know, things keep moving, moving, but you know that as you kind

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of tiptoe into the middle of those penguins and you look down, it's going to look a lot like

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it did at the beginning, when you, because you know more, you're at a different vantage point.

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And that's the whole idea, right, from this vantage point, you can probably continue to plot along.

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And as you get closer, you'll have the next vantage point where you can plot along. So the

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message here is don't decide everything at the point you know the least. We do this all the time.

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At the beginning of project, we know practically nothing, we know very little about the project.

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And that's when we do all of our planning, right, as if we can figure out what's going to happen

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towards the end. So stop doing that, right? That's what Agile is all about, iterative planning. Don't

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decide everything in the beginning, when you know the least. what you want to do is just plan for

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what you know and then as you move along, right, you decide you know more you adjust the plan.

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So your estimates are going to be more accurate this way. Because you know, if somebody asks you

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what are you gonna be doing three months from now? Tell them, "Well, I can tell you that we may

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be 50% accuracy, right? But I can tell you with almost 100% accuracy, what I'm going to do two

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weeks from now, right and two weeks after that." So the idea here is don't try to be omnipotent,

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because you're not right. Don't try to plan everything up front. You want to plan as you

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go and as you learn more than you could add more to the plan and get greater and greater estimates

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at where you are and how long it's going to take for you to get there. In this video, you learned

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that planning everything at the beginning of the project can lead to missed deadlines,

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and iterative planning allows for course corrections and more accurate estimates.