Begin Planning, with the end in mind

When Stephen Covey set out his 7 Rules for Highly Effective People, he offered this advice: Begin with the end in mind, also know as the habit of vision.  In summary Covey teaches us to work backwards from where you want to end up and make choices that will lead you there. This lesson applies to project planning and is particularly effective in Agile projects.

To apply the habit to planning I recommend that you engage your team in backwards planning by visualizing the desired end state with expected benefits fully realized and all features in place and then work backwards from there to define the sequence of deliverables required to achieve that goal.  Start by describing the completed solution with all the components and success criteria met. Get the team to list all the technical components and challanges that must be overcome to achieve that goal. Then moving backwards in time, brainstorm each successful step that must occur to produce the desired outcome. Ask the team to anticipate the roadblocks for each step and how they might best be overcome.

The real power of the exercise comes from visualizing success and making that image infectious by imprinting the final solution into the minds of all team members.  Armed with that image the team will anticipate the inevitable roadblocks and often have previously discussed how they may be overcome these obstacles. Backwards planning helps to prevent the team from getting “lost” where members loose sight of where they are in the project and what comes next. By starting at the end and visualizing all things that must be done to contribute to the success we increase the likelihood that we don’t overload a deliverable and will instead put everything in it’s proper place and in it’s own time. This practice is particularly effective on Agile projects because is fully engages the project team in the planning process while also exposing the team to the desired business solution before taking on the technical challenges.   

World class golfers, olympic athletes and top athletes from other sports have come to understand the power of visualization and many employ performance physiologists to help them with their “mental game”.  As project manager you can borow some of their techniques to help your team reach peak performance.