Objectives and planning

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Introduction

Your organisation needs structure and clarity. Hitting big goals, and winning in the market requires focus, and for everyone to be pulling in the same direction.

Often, engineering teams have a handle on this. They’re already working to a roadmap, using agile estimation and planning. But the rest of the organisation is also running projects – whether that’s raising a funding round, making and integrating an acquisition, launching a new product or hiring and accommodating the next fifty people.

These projects can all fail – early stage businesses are inherently risky – but some of that failure can be avoided. “We didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing”, “Commitment to the project wobbled and we dropped it when people left”, “The marketing team couldn’t launch at the trade show because the product wasn’t ready”, “Something happened that we didn’t anticipate” – all of this can be addressed with planning.