How planning for small-term can help you achieve big results

“I have been asked to prepare a plan for the whole year, and I do not know where to stop. Some tasks have too many details. For some, I don’t know much. If I go ahead and just put down something, it will result in wasted efforts. Do we really need to plan for these? Or can we do agile planning? That way I need to worry about only one sprint at a time !”

I was talking to a senior developer. For him, planning is a burden. In any case, planning for the long term is always a dilemma.

“The simplest way out is, do not plan for what you want to do (tasks), plan for what you want to achieve (results). It is simple to think through and also very effective. The activities may change over time, but goals will not.”

“Now divide the goals into smaller goals strictly based on an achievable timeline. Prepare task-level details, only for goals in the immediate future.”

For example, the plan for the quarter will include the set of features to deliver (goal), and the plan for next week will contain tasks like code to be written, defects to be fixed, etc.

“That sounds much easy, I can do it. Can you please talk to the project manager, and convince him about this method of planning?”

“Well, let me try!”. This sounded like a much more difficult goal to take up!

How do you decide on the level of details in your plan?