The Missing Ingredient in Quarterly Planning: Space to Think

The target for the project is known, the value you want to deliver is known, but the mechanics of how to get there are still a mystery. You need to do some current state analysis, work out where you really are and what’s involved in getting to where you want to get to. Except most organisations, deliberately or not, stifle this approach today.

Quarterly Planning and Discovery are not good friends

Many organisations, having bought into the concept of some sort of agility at scale, have some sort of quarterly planning rhythm these days. Not all. But enough for most of you to have an affinity with that statement.

When you have a project that needs discovery, when you genuinely don’t know what resources you will need in what quantity - you will learn that during discovery - how do you signal your resource need in quarterly planning?

This is not an unusual situation.

Follow the breadcrumbs Hansel

Let’s take two examples to illustrate the point.

In our first example, we have some legacy technology that we want to remove. No one fully understands what business processes the technology enables. The process of discovery will dig into the code and see what it’s doing. So, you’ll need someone technical and probably a business analyst. But until you know what business processes it’s enabling, you don’t know which business and technical experts you’re going to need access to. When you find it has an interface to your CRM system, you now know it would be helpful to have some input from the CRM team. When you find it enables a business process in the marketing team, you now know it is necessary to have some input from marketing about future states of those processes. But none of this was knowable before quarterly planning.

In our second example, a business unit wants to build a new customer-facing application. The process of discovery identifies that they want to use data on product availability, which needs input from the logistics teams. The process of discovery identifies that they will be collecting data on credit worthiness, which the finance team need to accept and process. It was not known, or knowable, that these connections would exist without discovery.

In the era of ‘too much to do’, discovery is quickly blocked

Whilst it’s often possible to know some of the resources that you will need to start, it’s uncommon for the resource need not to grow into other parts of the business. Parts of the business that are at full capacity for the quarter ahead, if not over capacity. When you approach those teams to support you, mid-quarter, they often have a full schedule of prioritised work and don’t have the capacity right now.

So what do we do? Wait a quarter and then get the next part of our discovery done? If we identify additional connections, discovery could take a year at this rate. What if we ‘pull strings’ and get an exec to call-in our priority to the team. Not a great way to build relationships, but maybe an option we need to consider. It gets tiring quickly if you need to do that 3 more times as you discover more needs from other teams. It’s not long before the execs feel like you’re out of favours.

The need for free capacity

Too many organisations believe the purpose of quarterly planning is to fill up the available capacity. Let’s make good use of the resources we’ve got and make sure they’re working on the most important things. And then because there’s still some important things we are not able to get to this quarter which we still really really want, let’s add a little bit more in as well. Tension is always good for a system, right?

A mature organisation creates space in a team’s quarterly plan. That space can be used for project discovery, or personal discovery, or learning and growth, or to give people time to think, or to allow flex into a system that is not 100% knowable up front, or to give space for technical debt remediation, or to allow teams to look into something that is concerning them. Creating space is not waste. Creating space is where creativity happens, opportunity gets identified and ideas are born. In an era of too much to do, creating space allows organisations to find ‘better ways to do’.

In whatever capacity you’re involved with quarterly planning, advocate for some space for teams.