OpenAgile Performance Planning Booklet

OpenAgile Performance Planning Outline

What This Booklet Is and Is Not
This booklet is not intended to create a lengthy dissertation regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of Agile methods. These methods have already been proven in practice by countless publications and projects that have been completed. It is not necessary to reproduce these proofs and arguments here. This booklet is intended to identify the challenges encountered through more traditional strategic planning practices and how OpenAgile addresses, solves, or eliminates them. It also meant to outline how these results can be replicated in your environment, quickly and effectively.

Traditional Challenges to Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning is typically undertaken to establish clear priorities for a particular organization over a long-term time period. Some are developed for 3, 5, 10 or more years into the future, and vary greatly by organization. Unfortunately for many organizations the effort that is put into the development of these plans often ends up sitting on a bookshelf rather than becoming central to the operation of the organization over the long term. This happens for three main reasons:
 * 1) 	Any plan spanning more than a few months time is vulnerable to changing conditions;
 * 2) 	The communication of changing context and priorities results in the degradation of plan value over time; and,
 * 3) 	Lack of the identification and involvement of true stakeholders or customers.

OpenAgile Solutions
OpenAgile offers many solutions to counter the challenges presented by traditional strategic planning methods. The process is specifically developed to create a nimble and efficient organization that responds almost instantly to change while continuously delivering value.
 * Firstly, its iterative approach allows very quick response to changing environments and builds in flexibility.
 * Secondly, the use of self-organizing teams that engage in regular, joint planning eliminate or greatly reduce the complexity of communicating requirements to stakeholders.
 * Thirdly, OpenAgile makes provision for the continuous involvement of major stakeholders, customers, or end-users.

How is This Accomplished?
OpenAgile is a system designed to create high performing teams through consultative decision-making, a learning environment, and a low-demand process that focuses on the delivery of value. This booklet outlines how the OpenAgile process can be applied to strategic planning efforts that result not in quickly obsolete plans created in past contexts, to true Performance Planning.

Context Changes Lead to Failed Implementation
Often the purpose of strategic planning is to establish some long term direction for an organization in the achievement of goals and objectives. The key difficulty in this is that often the external environment changes quite quickly after the plan is adopted. Most certainly by the time a 5 year plan has run its course the real world most likely looks quite different than when the plan was created. This can seem like an insurmountable problem. Change cannot be stopped! How does one plan for a constantly changing environment?

Many organizations attempt to handle this by expending a tremendous amount of effort developing plan after plan, after plan to address this constant change. Given the pace of change in the modern world, planning becomes a constant requirement. This is tremendously expensive. Billions and billions of dollars are spent annually developing plans for future action, attempting to keep pace with constant shifting needs and challenges. Most of these documents are never referred to again after acceptance. In short this approach does not often result in progress, just in a bookshelf full of plans that never come to bear, or promise to deliver great results to solve problems that either no longer exist, have become a less important priority, or that have changed to the point of requiring additional planning to address new realities.

Approach to Challenges Require Change
Many expectations are established once a strategic plan is developed. Often these plans set priorities for years in the future and can guide activities for a significant period of time. It is inconceivable to assume, as many plans do, that the external environment will remain constant in the time frame contemplated by any plan longer than a few months in duration. Plans have to change or planners run the risk of being unresponsive to new developments.

Additionally, there must be recognition that any strategic planning document assumes a certain reality throughout its duration. Predictions are made regarding future events, technological developments, political and demographic information, and the list goes on. It is unlikely in many cases for planners to be able to predict the future with a great deal of accuracy.

Traditional approaches often focus on taking effort to reduce uncertainty through planning. This is a tremendous gamble that rarely pays off for long periods of time. Research goes into making a plethora of projections, outlining trends, and identifying and assessing threats. A SWOT approach is typical, outlining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Old strengths can quickly become weaknesses, opportunities can disappear as fast as appear, and threats can be just as likely to shift in form and function.

This is not an attempt to discredit the many strategic planning methods in existence today. There are many tremendously effective methods of assessing one’s environment and establishing policies, guidelines, approaches, and initiatives to better position oneself in the modern business climate. What is important to remember is that these assessments are snapshots in time, and any attempt to implement organizational change as a result of these assessments must also take the rapid pace of change into account.

In many cases, the only way to apply traditional methods in a changing world is to revisit them on an almost constant basis. This approach is expensive, unsustainable, and ineffective in achieving organizational flexibility over the long term. It is tremendously beneficial to the many high-priced consultants active in the strategic planning world however!

Communication Complexities
In many cases it can be a difficult proposition to communicate goals and objectives effectively throughout an organization or functional unit. The more people involved is directly proportional to the difficulty in communications. Often goals and objectives are communicated by executives to direct reports, then from their direct reports to other direct reports, and so on and on down the organizational chart. This method results in communication and interpretation errors, rework, effort devoted to inaccurate goals, etc.

This is compounded in a rapidly changing environment, where objectives must change often to respond to new realities. Communication is difficult enough without adding the factor of rapidly changing directives. It can be a monumental task to inform everyone regarding changing requirements in a way that maintains key stakeholder involvement in decision making and true employee buy-in for major organization objectives.

Lack of Clearly Defined Goals
In many cases the solutions to problems and challenges are not immediately known and therefore can not be clearly defined. In many cases true goals and objectives are not even know either, rather vague conceptions of what success may look like. In these situations it is of paramount importance that deliverables, goals, objectives and methods be permitted to change and adapt to meet improved perceptions of what is required.

Plans intended to set strategic goals and objectives over the long term often establish solutions that are proven ineffective or inaccurate a few months later. Organizational priorities must be subject to constant feedback and stakeholder involvement to continuously confirm their value.

Unsustainable Expenditure of Effort
The challenges present with traditional strategic planning methods result in continuous large expenditures of dollars and effort to create largely ineffectual documents. This is unsustainable in the modern business environment, where misplaced resources can give competitors an edge, or in the public sector, where resources are poured down a bottomless pit of planning.

Rapidly changing environments mean that flexibility and adaptability will be the key determinants of success. Current practices that see the development of strategy in annual executive retreats with off-site brainstorming events and SWOT analyses are simply not responsive enough to ensure continued success.

Plan for Change Using Iterations
One of the most significant innovations from the agile community has been the use of iterative cycles to timebox effort. The use of planned cycles of activity creates the opportunity to repeatedly gauge progress, communicate requirements, gather stakeholder feedback, and adapt to changing realities. This single change to our work patterns will result in the reduction or elimination of many of the challenges presented by traditional strategic planning processes and methodologies.

One of the reasons OpenAgile approaches are more effective over the long term is the method in which change is addressed. Traditional practices attempt to reduce or eliminate uncertainty through planning.

2.	Assumes change and puts methods in place to deal with it

a.	Traditional approach is either to ignore, mitigate, or reduce change impacts.

b.	OpenAgile embraces change and welcomes it as an opportunity to improve deliverables

3.	Establishes collaborative network of team members through engagement meetings and progress meetings.

a.	Everyone on the team is informed regularly and participates in activity planning.

b.	Requirements set by the customer and established for the entire team to know.

4.	True customer engagement through direct involvement on the project team

a.	Customer to participate in engagement meetings as well

b.	To ensure value is realized and minimize rework due to developing deliverables without direct involvement.

5.	Sustainability is the desired outcome

a. Repeated iterations allow knowledge to be gathered concerning ongoing capacity, which encourages planning with a known capacity, which improves long-term sustainability

OpenAgile
1.	change the Value proposition

a.	Focus on developing business value rather than developing a plan.

b.	Establish a Team(s) to address goal(s)

c.	Develop a list of prioritized Value Drivers

d.	Hold an Engagement Meeting

e.	Have status meetings or progress reporting methods

i.	Must be visible by all team members and be as directly communicated as possible.

ii. Must re regular and religiously followed

2.	Plan regular value releases

a. Deliver value early and often, rather than a final plan at the end.

i. value release may occur every one or more cycles

ii. Add diagram

b. Frequent feedback with stakeholders ensures value delivered

c. One large planning document yet to be implemented becomes:

i. Smaller series of documents with earlier action

3.	Revisit the list of priorized value drivers regularly

a. As often as practical, every cycle, every quarter, no longer

b. You will be constantly planning as part of operations

Conclusion
1. OpenAgile offers opportunity to bring improved performance to any organization

2.	Improves collaborative environment

3.	Plans for change rather than attempting to eliminate it

4.	Brings long term sustainable results