After watching this video, you'll be able to articulate why upfront planning leads to missed
deadlines and summarize why iterative planning leads to greater accuracy.
Douglas Adams famously once said, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they
make as they fly by. Whoosh! There goes another deadline." This happens to us all the time, we put a
stake in the ground, and we miss it. The question is, why does this happen? But more importantly,
what can we do to avoid it? I like to call this navigating the unknown, right? So if I told you
that you need to navigate across this field of penguins, you know, you might look down
at the bottom there and say, "Well, I can I can kind of put my foot here and and maybe step in
and step around." But then when you get to the middle, like how do you plot a course to the other
side? Oh, and by the way, the penguins are going to keep moving as you're moving through them a lot
like software development, where the operating system is getting patched and patched. And
packages are getting patched. And you know, things keep moving, moving, but you know that as you kind
of tiptoe into the middle of those penguins and you look down, it's going to look a lot like
it did at the beginning, when you, because you know more, you're at a different vantage point.
And that's the whole idea, right, from this vantage point, you can probably continue to plot along.
And as you get closer, you'll have the next vantage point where you can plot along. So the
message here is don't decide everything at the point you know the least. We do this all the time.
At the beginning of project, we know practically nothing, we know very little about the project.
And that's when we do all of our planning, right, as if we can figure out what's going to happen
towards the end. So stop doing that, right? That's what Agile is all about, iterative planning. Don't
decide everything in the beginning, when you know the least. what you want to do is just plan for
what you know and then as you move along, right, you decide you know more you adjust the plan.
So your estimates are going to be more accurate this way. Because you know, if somebody asks you
what are you gonna be doing three months from now? Tell them, "Well, I can tell you that we may
be 50% accuracy, right? But I can tell you with almost 100% accuracy, what I'm going to do two
weeks from now, right and two weeks after that." So the idea here is don't try to be omnipotent,
because you're not right. Don't try to plan everything up front. You want to plan as you
go and as you learn more than you could add more to the plan and get greater and greater estimates
at where you are and how long it's going to take for you to get there. In this video, you learned
that planning everything at the beginning of the project can lead to missed deadlines,
and iterative planning allows for course corrections and more accurate estimates.