Why adopt this practice?
Release Planning improves the accuracy of project planning, the ability to predict resource usage, and the ability
to meet established delivery dates. In adopting this practice, the project team can better manage scarce resources and
focus on delivering scope with higher quality and value to the organization.
In some development approaches, project managers would plan the whole project at project initiation, and then execute
the plan, with little or no modifications to the original project plan unless there were significant scope changes or
risks that derailed the project. These approaches depend a lot on the project managers' personal knowledge of the
scope, and the resources available to deliver the scope. In many cases, these plans would become inaccurate and useless
after the first one or two phases. At that point, many project managers would simply manage the milestones and abandon
the detailed tasks.
Even seasoned project managers can benefit from Release Planning. As more and more software developers move to
iterative methods for delivering software, the need to perform just-in-time project planning is critical.
Planning for the next few weeks is always more accurate than planning for the next few months. The goal of
this practice is to balance the high-level and low-level planning such that detailed (low-level) planning occurs
just-in-time to support the successful delivery of the software products.
|