The Rolling-Wave planning technique

Innovation and product development projects have environments characterized by many unknowns and rapid change. Recently, an emerging set of practices termed agile product development has caused traditional orthodox product developers and project managers to rethink their approach to creating fast and flexible projects . As stated in The PDMA ToolBook 3 for New Product Development, flexibility is one of the most important corner stones whenever considered the project planning. Moreover, in new-product development, most management approaches presume a high ratio of knowns to unknowns , and most planning defines prescribed pathways through developmental stages and decision gates . At the same time, project environments reflect a very low amount of information at the beginning of the project, when the decisions importance is more relevant, while it increases as the project lifecycle is developed.

To counter with this paradox, the Rolling-Wave technique is one of the newer agile tools that has been widely adopted as it yields benefits of improved speed, flexibility and customer value. Rolling wave is a robust, sophisticated way to manage the risks of innovation, to adapt to change, to align the organization, and to align the team towards breakthrough reults . Recognizing that not all the aspects of a project can be fully defined or known at the starting stage, the Rolling-Wave planning allows the progressive elaboration of all the details as far as the project go on. The project management profession has used the term rolling wave referring to the expression "plan a little, do a little" to characterize its use of iteration along the project lifecycle.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the profession of project, program and portfolio management in:

1. Understanding the purpose, importance and principles of The Rolling-Wave technique.
2. Identifying the key characteristics and major aspects.
3. Recognizing the boundaries and limitations.

Developed by Gianluca Santinon