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Empower your team with Decentralized and Rolling Wave Planning

At Playbook, we believe great products can be delivered on time. We also know that teams must be able to respond to necessary changes along the way. That’s why we built Playbook to facilitate the Decentralized and Rolling Wave Planning methods.

Imagine a project where everyone contributes their area of expertise and not one person is overloaded with managing everything. Imagine a project where the plan is always accurate and up to date, and if it’s not, the system tells you where and how to fix it. That’s exactly what Decentralized and Rolling Wave Planning are all about. Here’s how Playbook makes this possible:

A Gantt chart showing a project timeline across four weeks (Week 21 to Week 24), with tasks assigned to different team members (Mary, John, Ken, Bob). Tasks include “Prototype Build,” “Layout Prototype,” “Review/Approve Schematic,” “Incorporate Changes,” “Get Quotes Prototype,” “Order Parts,” “Order Board,” “Assemble,” and “Test Prototype.” Tasks are represented as color-coded bars connected by dependency arrows, indicating the sequence of work and assigned team members.

What is Decentralized Planning?

In traditional project management, one person—often the project manager—bears the brunt of planning. While this is their responsibility, they can only make their best assumptions for how long every task will take. So they either have to guess or track down the subject matter experts (SMEs) who are often very busy and have very little interest in providing estimates for a plan they aren’t responsible for and know it will change anyway.

Decentralized Planning flips this script. Instead of one person owning the entire project plan, the SMEs actively participate in the development and management of the plan. These experts are the only people who can accurately describe what has to happen, in what order, and how long it will take.

Three professionals collaborate at a computer workstation—two women and one man—engaged in discussion and smiling while looking at the monitor. Behind them are color-coded task labels ("Document/Distribute FEA Results" in yellow and "Design Prototype: Backpanel Board" in pink), along with abstract pie chart icons in green, yellow, and red, representing project planning or task management concepts.

Why Decentralized Planning matters

Decentralized planning results in a more accurate plan, creates buy-in from both management and the team, fosters collaboration and happier teams, and generates more accurate end dates. Here’s how:

  • levels of planning@2x

    Multiple levels of planning
    When one person manages a plan alone, details can slip through the cracks, leaving team members to rely on memory—and you know how that goes. A decentralized approach breaks the project into levels of detail, with SMEs owning Summary Tasks. This creates a more accurate plan and avoids last-minute surprises.

  • balanced workload@2x

    Balanced workloads
    The Summary Tasks essentially become small projects within the project and their ownership is assigned to different SMEs. This way the project management burden is spread across multiple people and the top-level project manager can focus on high-level strategic oversight rather than micromanaging every task.

  • collaborative ownership@2x

    Collaborative ownership
    When SMEs are directly involved in project planning, they can see how their work impacts others, and who they’re depending on in order to complete their parts of the project. This understanding fosters collaboration and teamwork and eliminates the delays that commonly occur at the handoff points.

  • accuracy@2x

    Accuracy from the start
    When the SMEs can easily add their necessary details to the plan, and the extra details don’t overwhelm the PM, it creates a plan that is much more accurate. And accuracy isn’t just something we need to keep management happy; it provides something much more important—an accurate critical path.

It’s called the “critical” path
for a reason

The critical path identifies the sequence of tasks that directly affect your project’s end date. If any task on the critical path extends a single day, the end date moves one day. So the level of importance for any task on the critical path is much higher than tasks that have any amount of slack.

This is great news because it greatly reduces the sense of urgency for the dozens (and hundreds) of tasks that aren’t on the critical path. Without this distinction, people are concerned with a lot of work that isn’t urgent.

And guess what?

An accurate critical path instantly eliminates the need or desire to multitask. It empowers the team members to stay focused on the handful of tasks each day that can delay the project. This benefit alone eliminates the invisible daily slips that are the largest single cause of delay for most projects.

FAQs and notes about accurate plans

Buy-in and agreement to the end date
Because each team member contributes to the planning process and has ownership over their tasks, they’re more committed to delivering on time. Rather than a top-down approach where the PM tells everyone what to do and when, it’s a collaborative environment where everyone can see when and where the handoffs occur and the relative priorities of every task.

This reduces frustration and enables everyone to make correct decisions regarding what to work on.
What if it’s a really long project?
It’s nearly impossible to plan every detail for a complex project that has a high amount of uncertainty—like new product development. Besides the unknowns at the beginning, things often change along the way.

This is the reason for Rolling Wave Planning.

Just like the name implies, you update and manage the plan on a set cadence.
What is Rolling Wave Planning?
Rolling Wave Planning means you don’t create a detailed plan in one meeting and then try to execute it without any changes. Instead, the first step is to create a high-level plan structure for the entire project and make rough duration estimates for each section or phase. Then start filling in the details for the near-term work up to the first major milestone. The first goal is to have enough accuracy that the critical path is correct, and the second goal is to capture all the details that would cause a delay if something was forgotten.
How often should you do Rolling Wave Planning?
The most common interval is every two weeks, but it can vary in either direction based on what phase the project is in (level of uncertainty), how fast things are changing, and how important the project end date is. There is no hard rule so the team members can decide and adjust the frequency as necessary.
Who should participate in the Rolling Wave Planning?
Rolling Wave Planning and Decentralized Planning go hand in hand. All the core team members should be at the RWP meetings as well as anyone who has tasks on or near the critical path. This is the opportunity to look for ways to shorten the schedule. Can some of the handoffs be started earlier before their predecessors are completed? Can anyone help the people who are on the critical path? Do those people have assignments on other projects, and can they ignore those tasks while they’re working on the critical path of this project?
How much time does it take to update all the tasks that have been completed?
None. This meeting is not to review the tasks that have been completed since the last meeting. That is done by the team members in their Daily Task Update routine that takes less than two minutes. If there are out-of-date tasks, Playbook will highlight them and make it easy to update them.
Accurate and up-to-date plans lead to project success
One of the largest causes of late projects is people working on the wrong thing at the wrong time. And the only thing worse than a late project is finding out about a large delay at the very end. Both are caused by inaccurate and out-of-date plans and Decentralized and Rolling Wave Planning solves both of these issues.

Ready to revolutionize your Project Planning?

Let Playbook show you how Decentralized and Rolling Wave Planning can transform the way your team works together.

 

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