When developing new businesses or web services most of your time goes into planning. During the planning phase, people collaborate and take decisions based on the information available to them. Combined with their visions they decide what needs to be done and when it needs to be finished. Resulting in overcomplicated long documents and compromises so everybody stays happy developing the plan.

Described above is how I see traditional planning processes. Not particular bad of course, markets like the medical industry have compliance obligations and thus it’s hard to be agile (not impossible). This post is about one of the important aspects of running agile projects: decision making.

I’m taught to plan projects in advance. Describe what we’re going to do, what the goal of the project is and when it needs to be done. After some projects in school, I already learned that it’s just not the way to go. The plan changes all the time and time will never be on your side. The point here is, that when you change plans you need to update all your documents and re-run it through the complete team. Making it a complicated and dull task. Project managers should be working on stimulating collaboration in the team, not (re)writing documents.

The style above is based on developing to ‘point of plan‘. In other words, you work to create what is fully envisioned in the original plan according to schedule.

For every project success is determined by execution and results. You only reach good results with the right execution. Projects are successful when the end result is accepted by the people that have to work with it / use it. That’s why it’s important to stay in touch with the end user. They need to ‘buy’ what you’ve build. If they won’t ‘buy’ it, you’ve been building your beautiful plan but eventually end-up failing your project.

The economy is a turbulent place. So every piece of information available to you in order to create a plan, is probably old by the time you’re four weeks into execution. Methods that embrace change and promote to work independent are needed. Within the project team there needs to be a central understanding of what is build and what the project envisions. Plans should provide the minimum information that people need to make independent decisions.

The goal in these projects is reaching ‘point of sale‘, which means that a project aims to appeal an audience that accepts what is created and starts using, promoting or buying it.

Be agile, not rigid. Get the right people that know what they’re doing and trust them with making their own calls and decisions throughout execution.