Agile Project Planning: How to Budget When Using Agile

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The holidays are approaching. For many kids, this means writing long, wish-filled letters to Santa in hopes of snagging enough toys and games to keep themselves satisfied throughout the new year. While this strategy frequently works for children with indulgent parents, it’s a poor model for devising agile project planning budgets for IT.

Yet agile project budgeting is remarkably similar to kids at Christmas for many project managers. They’re asked to deliver a wish list of projects and price tags in December to serve as the foundation for the next year’s budgets. Project managers are reduced to guessing at (and hoping for!) what they think seems like reasonable projections and budget requests. This involves trying to define most of an agile project plan’s requirements in advance, or what IT business consultant and writer, Scott Ambler, calls “the classic Big Requirements Up Front (BRUF) tactic.” He correctly notes that BRUF is rarely accurate.

Read the full post on the Intertech blog.