Agile Project Inception: Escaping the Waterfall

Whether you are working on a new development effort or the next release of an existing system, you are probably required to make a compelling business case for the proposed work to clear an approval committee's "go/no-go" process. As an approval prerequisite, many organizations require big up-front planning and estimating resulting in a "complete" project plan including dates, costs, and resources. However, a key aspect of agility is an incremental, just-in-time approach to planning and estimating. Kenny Rubin focuses on how to align management and agile teams to eliminate the message of "build in an agile way but still provide all of the same waterfall-like artifacts to get your project approved." Kenny describes different resource-allocation and organizational-constraint models and then focuses on agile techniques for incrementally answering reasonable versions of questions such as: "When will the project be completed?" "How much functionality can be developed by a particular date?" and "How much will the project cost?"