The other day I spoke with a high ranking line manager about a very sudden assignment change in my project. Only two weeks earlier I had received the commitment for the assignment and now the person in question was about to be reassigned to another project endangering mine, though I was offered another engineer in exchange. In response to my question whether I have to expect another sudden assignment change impacting continuity, he said „I have no crystal ball, so I cannot tell".

Crystal ball? I ask you! Even in the wizarding world of Harry Potter the use of crystal balls is considered „obscure magic". Sure, we Muggles have no crystal balls, but we have plans, schedules and commitments.

Maybe it is just me, but I am seeing a tendency that organisations are loosing the ability to plan and schedule. With rising popularity of agile development, people seem to believe that planing and scheduling is no longer necessary. I believe that they are horribly wrong.

You have a goal, a plan is your „how" to achieving this goal. Your schedule is the „when" to the „how". It is making a vision reality in a reliable way. What can be so wrong or worse, obsolete, about that?

„We don’t plan, because reality turns out differently anyway" a technical project manager once told me. (The development project he was in charge of failed miserably) His blind spot was proper risk management. Risks are what brings our plans off course (assuming a good plan, that is), so if there were crystal balls, you’d be better advised to use them to identify the risks and avoid them in the best possible way.

In the end, I got the commitment for the new assignment to stay aboard as long as the project required to fulfil the plan.

Does your organisation also tend to „underrate" planning, scheduling and risk management?