Few examples follow.
| Planning is beneficial with |
Reaction is beneficial with |
| Customer objectives, priorities and requirements that are known, well understood, and stable |
Customer objectives, priorities and requirements that are uncertain, ambiguous, or partially unknown, that are volatile and can change because of things that are outside our area of influence and control |
| Domain that is know and well understood |
A new unknown domain, a complex domain or a wicked problem
|
| Well known, well functioning, stable technologies |
A technology that is unknown, novel, unstable, still under development, or used outside contexts and limits tried before |
People that know each other and worked together before or worked to similar problems with similar approaches, and the level of interdependency is low
|
People that don’t know each other and is used to work to different kinds problems and with different approaches, or the level of interdependency to other teams/departments/external partners/suppliers is high
|
| External dependencies, as other teams/departments/external partners/suppliers, are well known and understood, stable and their response time and service level is known and stable |
Some external dependencies are unknown and not well understood, are unstable or their response time and service level is unknown or unstable |
Just enough, just-in-time
|
When circumstances changes, with the suitable speed, when it is the appropriate time to act
|
In every project the mix of things on the left and the right can be different.
Sometime even during the same project the mix changes as circumstances change.
A good balance of planning and reacting depends on that mix.
Planning is a form of anticipation, reacting is a way of adaptation. These images below show some examples of the balance between the two:
Back to: Planning ÷ reacting: finding the balance