The Rolling-wave Planning

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. 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. 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. This technique uses progressive elaboration, which is the act of elaborating the work packages in greater detail as the project unfolds.

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. As the project progresses, the risks, assumptions, and milestones originally identified become more defined and reliable.

It’s 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. 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.

Rolling Wave Characteristics

• Progressive elaboration: a project management technique that involves progressive elaboration to add detail to the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) on an ongoing basis. 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.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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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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).

Application

Usage in Project Management-Risk management

The rolling wave method is particularly useful in projects with high uncertainty. Therefore, it is necessary to use the best risk management practices. The rolling wave planning, therefore, is the process of breaking down the work breakdown structure into time intervals. 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.

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. These projects are not structured to finish with a knowable deliverable. They’re exploring and hoping to discover new products or services. Similarly, high-tech projects lend themselves to rolling wave planning. 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.

Managing innovation programs with a rolling wave

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. (I use the term “program” to include projects as well.) Other organizations become overwhelmed by the challenges, give up on processes, and rely on smart people to put forth their best efforts. 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.”

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. 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.