"Effective agile planning processes strive to balance the forecasting and planning of future events with ensuring organizations can deal with uncertainties as new information comes to light. For many people, the responses to these events are well established. When they are imminent but responding to them only requires a modest investment, leaders capture them in roadmaps and handle them through everyday development practices. When they are imminent and responding to them requires a more significant investment, leaders handle them through a combination of development-and portfolio-management practices.
These strategies are usually adequate under normal circumstances. But they have serious drawbacks when it comes to reliably anticipating, planning for, and managing events that are likely to occur outside of conventional planning-time horizons. Nor are these strategies sufficient for managing events whose timing is difficult to pin down because many of events are subjective and likely to be associated with complex factors, and/or whose outcomes can be dramatically improved through a consistent set of low-cost prior actions.
Fortunately, there are planning techniques that can help organizations position themselves to reduce unnecessary downside costs and improve their chances of realizing any potential upside during uncertain event time horizons. These techniques give leaders the tools they need to be more planful about how they allocate their efforts and resources, helping them set up their organizations to best benefit from events, regardless of how fluid their timing is.
OUR LATEST paper introduces a new planning construct, Collapsing Sliding Windows (or CSW), that fills a critical gap in how organizations can prepare for events that may occur beyond one to three years, the time horizon that organizations that want to embrace agility and/or Lean development practices typically plan for."
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Excerpt from the introduction of “Collapsing Sliding Windows: A New Planning Construct for Managing Uncertain Futures” by Luke Hohmann and Harry Max.
To dive deeper into this topic and explore how Collapsing Sliding Windows can transform long-range agile planning, you can read the full article by Luke Hohmann and Harry Max here: READ FULL ARTICLE ➡️