Following on from my discussion of Specifications are useless, I’ve read a post by Patrick Kua regarding “Planning IT projects”. He makes some really interesting comments which I agree with:

An alternative I propose is a lighter weight approach with businesses focusing on what they want to do and not what projects a particular group within the business proposes. It’s more important to focus on the business problem first and the implementation details last so that both are aligned as closely as possible. After identifying what the business want to do they should next define how much they would like to spend. The amount needs to be feasible and measuring existing project costs and benefits and getting IT involvement is definitely required. Magic numbers plucked from thin air are never useful but do need to be balanced in terms of value maximisation and technical feasibility.

The focus for the project implementation should also be different from traditional methods. The focus should no longer be ‘keep to the plan’. It should instead maximise the value the business gets while keeping aligned with the business objective. Agile projects provide a great way of doing this by splitting down the detail into chunks that have identifiable value, getting the business to continually identify what is valuable in relation to their business objective and then getting the value faster and earlier than a big bang approach.

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