Predictability in Agile

Some of the leaders may feel that rapid delivery of Agile is not needed.

They may think that customers don't need many environmental changes.

That it will bother them.

They may say, "We don't need rapid delivery. We need predictability."

I'd say those leaders usually get neither.

Yogi Berra, a famous baseball player and coach, once said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

It's hard to predict things far in the future. The quality of predictions goes down pretty quickly.

Predictability is only possible in the presence of consistent behavior of successful delivery.

If rapid delivery is not one of the company's goals, then the company will struggle to deliver on time.

As a result, managers will have to pad all project plans with significant buffer time to obscure issues with delivering on time.

Internally, a company will have to build a more aggressive plan than declared externally, intending to "try to make it," and if it fails, then use the available buffer.

For internal coordination, all the teams must follow the aggressive plan and update it with each failed attempt. This re-planning causes overhead and extra time at the company's expense.

Besides, the original plan will appear to lack integrity in the eyes of the development teams. It will cast a shadow on all the future plans.

Yet another issue will be related to the desire to "stay on course" and avoid changing the original plan even when the business situation demands it.

The rigidity of the plan often causes friction between business and technical management and ends up with unnecessary and expensive activities like tracking documents and messages to prove the history of business requests and decisions made in the past.

On the opposite, in Agile, predictability is about consistent delivery every sprint, hitting small goals every time, and calculating projected completion based on the established delivery rate.

Predictably, if teams stop delivering every sprint, the major milestones will shift. It will be evident very quickly and will demand immediate action to improve.

The scope of work and the plan remain open-ended. The power remains with the businesspeople to change what is beneficial for the product.

This makes plans both predictable and flexible and focuses teams on consistently delivering small increments and increasing development speed.

No effort must be made to justify the past and keep track of who said what and when. As it doesn't help deliver products faster.

And it's possible to separate the production deployments from the customer releases in case the Product Owner or business leaders do not want to upset customers with frequent changes.

Business leaders can plan the impact on the market and release the updates as planned.

What could be more predictable than having a ready product in your hands and the option to release it at any moment?

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