The Rolling-wave Planning

Revision as of 21:59, 20 February 2022

Abstract

It is not often possible to foresee the future activities in a project with consistent detail over the entire period of the project. Project managers faced with unexpected events employ a “rolling wave” approach to planning.^[1] The rolling-wave Planning is a project management technique that requires iterative planning to “roll out” detailed plans for the near term and reevaluate the plan regularly as the project proceeds.^[2] When project managers recognize that firm commitments cannot be made on the basis of volatile information, they develop plans in waves as the project unfolds and information becomes more reliable. ^[1]This technique uses progressive elaboration, which is the act of elaborating the work packages in greater detail as the project unfolds.^[3]As the project progresses, the risks, assumptions, and milestones originally identified become more defined and reliable.^[4]

Figure 1:The rolling wave model

It is necessary to provide key milestones and assumptions as they will help stakeholders see the reason for using Rolling Wave Planning and what to expect as the project progresses. Rolling Wave Planning focuses the team on the short-term goals, course correcting as needed. The rolling-wave planning is particularly useful in projects with high uncertainty. ^[3] It is a good idea to have an understanding of the “big blocks” without detailing exactly the scope of the project. The article will introduce the definition of the Rolling Wave Planning and provide the guidelines to develop it. The article will also provide a brief overview of the literature and area where the Rolling Wave can be applied, along with its limitations.

Introduction

Mountain Climber Analogy

It is common for project managers to be asked about the estimates of the duration and the cost of a project before having a fully understanding of the scope. This situation is related to the discussion of how this scenario develops, why this approach seldom works, and what can be done to structure a more realistic alternative. To address this issue, Knuston suggested to consider an analogy.^[2] Imagine that you are an expert mountain climber, ready to climb an imposing mountain you've never seen before. The sponsors of the expedition ask you the time and resources you would need and expect you to come forth with some reasonable answers. On the other hand, if you shoot from the hip, you know the accuracy of your guess will be weak at best. In this case, the rolling wave is an alternative way. This method can both satisfy your sponsors and add a sense of integrity and credibility to your commitments. At the beginning of the climb, you stand at the bottom of the mountain, with minimal knowledge of what confronts you. But your mountain climbing background and experience, combined with historic data gathered from other people who have tried to climb this mountain, allows you to approximate the time and resources required. Note the term is approximate, not estimate. When approximating, afford yourself all the flexibility possible. Provide the sponsor with a detailed plan, and present everything required to prepare the party to start moving up the mountain. Determine the necessary equipment. Pinpoint the right people. Acquire and study all the information about this particular mountain. Plot a route of travel. This is called scheduling through the first Planning Horizon. A Planning Horizon—planning out as far as you can see—is a target that may be stated as the number of days, the next phase of the project, or until the next milestone or deliverable is reached. Thus far you have provided your sponsor with an approximation of the requirements in time and resources to finish the total effort, and a detailed schedule for the first Planning Horizon.^[2]

Rolling Wave Characteristics

• Progressive elaboration: The Rolling Wave involves progressive elaboration to add detail to the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) on an ongoing basis. It is the process of breaking down the work breakdown structure into time intervals. ^[5] For example, Phases 1-2 might be broken down fully in the WBS. Phases 3-6 might be outlined only to the level of subprojects. Then, while schedule activities for phase 1 are underway, the detailed planning for phase 3 would commence. As phase 2 is put in motion, planning for phase 4 would start and so forth. ^[6]At the end of each phase, the project manager will study the structure of the WBS and will expand it to include more details. It is particularly suitable for projects where the work involved in a phase is highly variable and depends on the result of the previous phase, such as projects that require prototypes and, in general, in the engineering sector. ^[7]These concepts address the idea that planning near term work in detail and later work in less detail. Then as new details emerge, going back to the plans and updating them with the new data.

• Shorten time: Rolling wave or adaptive planning is a key idea in agile methods.^[8] This technique may also help shorten time to completion in 2 ways: 1) By making it possible for productive activities to begin without waiting for every detail of the project work to be determined in advance. 2) By eliminating downtime for additional planning in the middle of a project since planning is done continuously.^[6]

Rolling Wave Planning vs. Predictive Planning

One of the big ideas of agile and iterative development is to adapt based on feedback, and this is not only with respect to requirements and design, but also the plan or schedule. Adaptive planning is a refinement of the well-known rolling wave planning concept—more on this later. In contrast, predictive planning implies there would be such an iteration-by-iteration plan to the project end. In adaptive planning, there are milestones with dates, but the path of iterations to those milestones is left flexible or adaptive. And, the milestones themselves may change if in the best interest of the project. Predictive planning would go further than this, it would speculate a week-by-week or iteration-by-iteration schedule of the path to these milestones. Adaptive planning is closer to optimal in terms of working towards milestones; each step can be the most skillful we know how to plan regarding risk, productivity, and effectiveness because each planning step is taken with maximum—and fresh—information. In contrast, a predictive plan is suboptimal. In fact, it could be close to the worst or most risky possible path to the milestone goal because it is created with the least amount of information, speculating into the far future. Not only is predictive planning suboptimal with respect to effectiveness and risk, it doesn't account for opportunities. Adaptive plans embrace change and opportunity; predictive plans fight or ignore it. ^[8]

Guidelines of Rolling Wave Planning

The work proceeds iteratively(an approach that applies an iterative style of planning and execution in defined time periods). Initially, the program establishes a top-down structure and then fills out the work bottom-up within each defined phase.

Figure 2:Six steps of Rolling wave

Six steps of Rolling Wave

Rolling wave program management works exceedingly well because it encourages a strategic perspective while executing the day-to-day work. Exhibit 1 illustrates the six steps of the rolling wave approach to balancing top-down and bottom-up planning.^[9]

Step 1: Applying an Integration Strategy. The program manager must take the lead in establishing the theme of uncertainty recognition and reduction. All development programs are fraught with unknowns and require dialogue among different people with different expertise. Here are three activities for readying the team for rolling wave:

• First, evaluate the quality of the product vision and requirements. The product vision needs to be only a few sentences describing the expected customer benefits, form, and technology.
• Second, evaluate and delineate the initial product architecture. Recalling that development projects are iterative and design-oriented, the program should consider the design constraints and technical philosophies of the delivering organization.
• Third, align the program architecture with product architecture. Most importantly, the program manager must guide the selection of the appropriate project lifecycle strategy.

Step 2: Perform Top-Down Planning, Starting with Level 1 of the Work Breakdown Structure. In the rolling wave, the program team performs the first cut at planning with a top-down perspective. Develop initial estimating approximations for time durations, resources, and expenses, starting by estimating the sizing of the time buckets. Start top-down: examine, validate, and document system-level assumptions, then subsystem-level assumptions, and then component-level assumptions. Program management tools for describing the high-level perspective are familiar: organizational breakdown structure (OBS), work breakdown structure (WBS), product breakdown structure (PBS), and cost breakdown structure (CBS).
Step 3: Perform the First Planning Iteration, Starting Bottom-Up. In this step, the team details out individual work packages for the first horizon, “bottom-up.” Then, analyze the work with a network logic chart and publish it as a Gantt chart. Other important points include:

• Keep visible the theme of uncertainty reduction.
• Identify any work that might occur in the later horizons using top-down methods.
• Define and validate the project's processes of contract closeout (verifying the design and deployment meets customer requirements) and administrative closure (for the delivering organization).
• Establish a work package and fixed date for replanning for the next time horizon.
  

Step 4: Baseline. At this point, the program has identified two kinds of work: the work contained in not totally defined “black boxes” and the detailed work of the first time bucket. If you have not yet done so, perform a risk analysis and establish management reserves before setting the time, cost, and scope baselines.
Step 5: Execute the Planned Work in the First Time Bucket. Inside the time buckets, work is straightforward: plan your work, and work your plan. For rolling wave it is particularly important to have a learning orientation. Capture learning for feed-forwarding to anticipate and avoid future problems, or to quickly react to the risks that the team decides to accept.
Step 6: Iterate Through the Planning Horizons and Close the Project. This last step involves the continuing iteration of the “plan a little, do a little” approach, ending with the closing of the program. The important elements include: Assess the team's learning, the needed work, and replan the next horizon of the program (go back to Step 3).^[9]

Application

Usage in Project Management-Risk management

Payne and Turner suggested different levels of planning according to project type, and developed a project categorization system called the Goals and Methods Matrix described in Figure 3. Projects are categorized based on two variables: 1. how well known the goals are, and 2. how well known the methods are. They found that for projects with unknown goals and unknown methods planning should have: a high-level project definition report, with the level of detail proportional to project size; a milestone plan and project responsibility chart, where milestones represent the lifecycle; lower level detail developed use rolling wave planning. ^[10]For type 2 and type 3 projects, the lower level activity plans will be developed on a rolling-wave basis, as early components are delivered, or early life-cycle stages are completed respectively. ^[11]

Figure 3: Goals and Methods Matrixn

This method can be applied when: It is not possible to define a detailed project plan shortly. It is not clear which deliverables should be produced. It is not possible to organize the different phases of the project. The rolling wave method is particularly useful in projects with high uncertainty. Therefore, it is necessary to use the best risk management practices.

Rolling Way Planning for dynamic environment

The business environment is changing at an increasing pace. Perrino and Tipping reported, "the pace of technology is accelerating, raising the stakes and risks for managing innovation, and requiring early warning and shorter response time". ^[12] Projects conducted in highly uncertain environments are a key unresolved project management issue and present the following challenges^[13]:

• Planning for uncertain outcomes;
• Balancing flexibility with reliability and accountability;
• Balancing decision quality against decision speed;
• Timing scope freeze during rapid change.

In the dynamic environment new events that compromised plans arose rapidly throughout project delivery. The quantity of change made detailed plans difficult to maintain. In the time it took to adjust the plan, additional changes would occur. Analysis and decision making had to be conducted more rapidly than the emergence of new changes. Plans with excessive detail were found to be misleading and abandoned in favor of rolling wave approach. Even in the static environment, there could be too many unknowns at the start to be resolved by the deadline, so the rapid introduction of new unknowns in the dynamic environment was doubly challenging. Using progressive elaboration to fulfill knowledge gaps, it might be possible to move a project to the left in Fig.X, thereby achieving the objective in a more predictable fashion.

Projects and industries that good fit for Rolling Wave Planning

Rolling wave planning technique is suitable for projects where all the project planning data isn’t immediately available and when the project execution is risky. Generally, rolling wave planning is mostly used for software development. But there are other projects and industries that are a good fit for rolling wave planning and its iterative type of project planning. For example, research and development (R&D) projects are exploring and hoping to discover new products or services. These projects are not structured to finish with a knowable deliverable. ^[14]

Similarly, high-tech projects lend themselves to rolling wave planning. Program managers in new product development (NPD) and other technical environments face a number of challenges: information overload, numerous decisions, complexity, shifting strategies, unreliable suppliers, low participant commitment, management expectations for detailed control, the futility of scheduling inventions, speed and urgency, high uncertainty, finite market windows, and customer desires for flexibility. Some organizations approach these challenges by defining program management as “rules and tools” and end up rigid, bureaucratic, and ineffective at innovating. Other organizations become overwhelmed by the challenges, give up on processes, and rely on smart people to put forth their best efforts. ^[9]Any project that is devoted to innovation is going to constantly pivot to take advantage of opportunities. They’re not on a linear path. They require the flexibility to respond as features change but still provide the control needed to deliver any project successfully.^[15] As Kurian Jacob, a rolling-wave practitioner at Motorola, states: “We develop advanced technology capabilities that have never been done before. Rolling wave helps to meet the challenge of keeping energy focused on short-term work with the eye on the long term.”^[9]

Limitations

Project management that is undertaken using rolling wave planning must have a well-defined project scope from the outset. Otherwise, as planning is elaborated scope creep is likely to occur.^[6] Even being the simplicity and elegance of this concept tempting, the negative point is basically that, when using Rolling Wave Planning you tend to increase the risk level of your project since you can face an unexpected huge issue/cost every time you go ahead for detail the next package. Having this in mind, you should not use this approach when you have a critical and huge project where the money invested is so high that any risk can represent massive losses or, projects that any mistake can result in massive impacts on the environment, security, politics and/or economy. A practical example of these projects could be the construction of a huge nuclear plant as part of a development program of a rising economy, where, any mistake or huge unexpected issue could cause an immense impact on the environment, people's lives and even put down the entire economy of the place. In these cases, that's why so much money, effort, and time are spent in planning and avoiding uncertainty.

Annotated Bibliography

Larman, Craig (2004). "Chapter 11: Practice Tips". Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide. p. 253. ISBN 9780131111554. Retrieved Oct 14, 2013. ^[8] This book is the definitive guide for managers and students to agile and iterative development methods: what they are, how they work, how to implement them—and why you should. Chapter 11 gives a big idea of Rolling Wave Adaptive and discusses the topic of adaptive planning versus predictive planning. By comparing the two approaches, benefits of Rolling Wave Planning are demonstrated: response to uncertainties swiftly and ability to embrace change and opportunity.

Githens, G. D. (2001). Manage innovation programs with a rolling wave. PM Network, 15(5), 35–39. ^[9] This article suggests using the rolling wave planning to manage programs in new product development and other technical environments to resolve uncertainties and achieve faster results and outcomes that are more creative. It states that the rolling wave planning can give a framework for creating a balanced program approach for control and flexibility. This article also provides very detailed guidelines of using this technique. It illustrates the six steps of the rolling wave approach to balancing top-down and bottom-up planning.

Payne, J. H., & Turner, J. R. (1999). Company-wide project management: the planning and control of programs of projects of different type. International journal of project management, 17(1), 55-59. ^[16] This article gives an overview of different levels of planning according to project type and developed a project categorization system called the Goals and Methods Matrix. It defines the scopes of projects that are suitable with rolling wave planning and suggests that for type 2 and type 3 projects, the lower-level activity plans will be developed on a rolling-wave basis.

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} Laufer, A., Hoffman, E. J., Russell, J. S., & Cameron, W. S. (2015). What successful project managers do. MIT Sloan Management Review, 56(3), 43.
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1 2.2} Knutson, J. (1996). Rolling wave approach to project management. PM Network, 10(6), 5, 8.
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} Bright Hub PM. (2009, September 15). Rolling Wave Planning in Project Management. Brighthubpm.com. Retrieved from: https://www.brighthubpm.com/project-planning/48953-basics-of-rolling-wave-planning/
4. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling-wave_planning
5. ↑ Pandurang Chavan. (2020, February 20). The rolling wave in project management. Tw project.com Retrieved from: https://twproject.com/blog/rolling-wave-project-management/
6. ↑ ^{6.0 6.1 6.2} Tom Alby. Rolling Wave Planning. Poroject management knowledge.com Retrieved from: https://project-management-knowledge.com/definitions/r/rolling-wave-planning/
7. ↑ Pandurang Chavan. (2020, February 20). The rolling wave in project management. Tw project.com Retrieved from: https://twproject.com/blog/rolling-wave-project-management/
8. ↑ ^{8.0 8.1 8.2} Larman, Craig (2004). "Chapter 11: Practice Tips". Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide. p. 253. ISBN 9780131111554. Retrieved Oct 14, 2013.
9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4} Githens, G. D. (2001). Manage innovation programs with a rolling wave. PM Network, 15(5), 35–39.
10. ↑ Payne, J. H., & Turner, J. R. (1999). Company-wide project management: the planning and control of programs of projects of different types. International journal of project management, 17(1), 55-59.
11. ↑ Turner, J. R., Turner, J. R., & Turner, T. (1999). The handbook of project-based management: improving the processes for achieving strategic objectives.
12. ↑ Perrino, A. C., & Tipping, J. W. (1991). Global management of technology: A study of 16 multinationals in the USA Europe and Japan: Practitioners' forum. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 3(1), 87-98.
13. ↑ Larson, E. W., Gray, C. F., & Desai, G. V. (2011). Project management: The managerial process.
14. ↑ Ryan Buma. (2021, October 28). What is Rolling Wave Planning? Project manager.com Retrieved from: https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/rolling-wave-planning
15. ↑ Ryan Buma. (2021, October 28). What is Rolling Wave Planning? Project manager.com Retrieved from: https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/rolling-wave-planning
16. ↑ Payne, J. H., & Turner, J. R. (1999). Company-wide project management: the planning and control of programs of projects of different types. International journal of project management, 17(1), 55-59.