Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Serendipity is real and hugely important to innovation.

That said, I've worked exactly 0 jobs that had too much planning in 20 YOE. However I worked lots of jobs with over-measuring. Constant check-ins, syncs, status meetings, team wide weeklies, etc. Measuring every step we take before we take the next one, but no vision as to wear this journey is supposed to actually lead.

This presents its own danger, and Big Agile Industrial Complex is the current manifestation of this problem.

I think its a micro-optimization that creates a macro problem.

We did not get from the Wright Brothers to a Boeing 777 with lots of minute check-ins and week-long visions of micro deliverables along the way.

You DO get improvements applying that process to say- churning out the current plane on the factory floor in a 25% more efficient manner, step by step. Not a lot of planning for what 6 months looks like there.

So one needs to match the type of problem they are solving with the correct amount of vision & planning.

Same here, I've never worked at a place that did too much planning. However, I've been at a lot of places that wildly overvalued plans.

"Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

The culprit is usually someone who sees their job as checking boxes off a list. In extremely complex situations, box-checkers can be valuable to help ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, but everything goes to shit when you elevate people like that to any position involving the word "manager." Project manager, product manager, people manager -- it's a disaster to try to reduce these jobs to checking boxes. Immediately they'll start to say things like, "Why did we spend so much time creating a plan if we're not going to follow it?" They'll create deadlines for finalizing plans and insist that everything after the deadline has to robotically follow the plan. They see their job as 80% making sure every box on the plan is ticked and 20% stopping you from doing anything there isn't a box for. If they do that and the project fails, they point fingers at people for not adding all the right boxes to the project plan according to the schedule for making boxes.

Good planning isn't about checking boxes. It's about forcing yourself to consider all aspects of a project, crystallizing your plan at a certain point in time, and periodically reconsidering and re-crystallizing your plan on a cadence that makes sense for the project.

Sounds like a layer of management that doesn't understand the works below, or the vision above, and has to maintain value theater.

You just described median middle manager behavior.

Over-planning often comes from a place of management wanting observability and predictability. They want to be in control and know all the risks.

This ends up inversing all of the agile Manifesto.

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

* Working software over comprehensive documentation

* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

* Responding to change over following a plan

* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

This is a bad assumption for the agile premise in many large non tech orgs. Many cases internal tech tools just do not have users with this mindset.

Here’s what I wanted, why isn’t it already this way, go fix it, stop showing me stuff that isn’t done yet.

Or the other flavor where every touch point changes their feature of the week such that you are always behind what they actually want.

It’s entirely possibly to iterate such that no one is happy with delivery.

Yeah, planning can feel like a trap sometimes. But take the example of the discovery of penicillin. It was a fluke... If the scientist had followed rigid steps, he might’ve missed that moment. Flexibility and being open to surprises is key.

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