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 its key characteristics and major aspects.
3. Recognizing its boundaries and limitations.

Developed by Gianluca Santinon

Overview of the Rolling-Wave technique

Projects environments nowadays are evolving rapidly and business systems have become increasingly complex in order to optimize cost, quality, timeliness of results and comply with variations in regulations in marketplace . Most innovation and product development success stories show that reduced organic teams of competent and motivate people, small batch sizes of information, iteration, and rapid feedback from the customer or user are the key principles to succeed . In a context described by the former quotes, the agile approach has become more and more popular, underlining the key of success for each project. As mentioned in the The PDMA ToolBook 3 for New Product Development, an agile enterprise rapidly adapts to changing business challenges and opportunities. Agility has always been important for an enterprise to achieve and maintain competitive advantage. Agile organizations have the capability to quickly anticipate change as well as react to the unexpected. With this agile capability, these organizations are able to create value and do it with speed and flexibility .

In these situations where the conditions are intricated and not easily predicted, the Rolling Wave has revealed to be one of the agile techniques that offers clear benefits and permits to overcome the brittle schedule problem towards an alternative robust planning. Defining a brittle schedule as a project that breaks easily due to a change in assumptions, the alternative robust planning can be seen as a project model that can withstand the stresses of change in the project, adapt to changes and serve to focus the project success. A robust plan is a useful tool for the project team to align and integrate its efforts in order to achieve a project characterized by speed, flexibility, and customer value added .