Project Planning in an Agile Project

Tate Stuntz has an interesting post on his blog arguing that Project Plans are obsolete and hard to maintain when doing Agile projects. In my experience on agile projects, project planning and Gantt chart making definitely has to change, but there are still ways I think you can make MS Project and Gantt charts work for you in an agile context. Here are my recommendations based on my experience:

• Learn to use MS Project efficiently (see my previous post for recommendations). I've seen PM's take 2 weeks to build a project plan - if this is you then trying to work this way in a 2 week iteration cycle means you're not moving fast enough. You have to be at the point where you could re-boot your project plan in a matter of hours so that you can adjust quickly.
• Use MS Project for planning and not for tracking. If you're working with short iteration cycles, you'll see improved tracking by simply management by walking around. In addition, measuring project velocity is more valuable than percentage complete since in an Agile project the finish line is not always defined.
• Use a project plan for iteration planning at a macro-level and not for iteration tracking within an iteration cycle. What I like doing is maintaining a project plan with a simple list of user stories in each 2 week iteration. That allows me to track dependencies between user stories pretty easily. At review time at the end of an iteration, we discuss the next iteration with our stakeholders and reset expectations by re-forecasting the plan (which takes no more than an hour of work). That gives stakeholders a good understanding of what we currently see as in and out of scope and when features may be coming up. This is highly valuable and I find is critical for buy in for stakeholders - if the response from the team is simply, "we can only see to the end of the next iteration cycle" this tends to make business users very nervous.
• If you need pretty Gantt charts, one of my favourite methods is to use Visio - it provides pretty Gantt charts for presentations without the fuss of Project.
• I tend to use the whole team as a big pool for planning iterations. This gets you out of the micro-detail of having to assign one user story to one person, another user story to another person and so on. If I have 4-5 developers on a team, that gives me 70 hours x 4-5 developers for a total iteration budget of 280-350 hours. I can then do a good estimate of each user story that includes planning, development and QA with the team. We simply add up a bunch of these stories into the budget and that becomes the iteration. The way to do this in MS Project is to take your steps and instead of assigning individuals assigned to each task and running them in parallel try simply taking a generic role of "developer" and assigning them at 500% to every task in sequence. You can then tell how much time you're going to spend across the entire team without having to fuss with all the micro-dependencies.
• For preliminary planning, use low-tech Gantt chart tools such as whiteboards, post-it notes, etc. I can create a Gantt chart without MS Project using a white board, some markers and post-it notes. This works great without the overhead of the tooling getting in the way. If you want to preserve it, simply take a digital photo of it and store the picture.

I think if you follow some of these techniques as a Project Manager, you can still sleep at night without feeling completely out of control and yet move faster and leaner. In addition, you can use project planning to help sell the concept of Agile to stakeholders who aren't as comfortable with the XP style of development and give them the comfort of a traditional project plan without locking yourself into the traditional bureaucratic approach to Project Management.