Where's the business value?

One of the key characteristics to understand about the nature of predictive planning is that the minute someone says, "How much is this going to cost?", or "When can this be delivered?", they significantly constrain the value that will be created. And, at the end of the day, shouldn't it be about maximizing the value to your customer? Imagine if we spent one more month on a project and delivered twice as much value. Wouldn't that be something our customer would want over meeting a date or a particular set of features just because it's been speculatively laid out in a contract?

Instead, we focus on a date, an amount of money, and the functionality. And unfortunately, functionality doesn't always translate to value (as we saw in the previous section when we missed the point entirely).

This is why the predictive planning used in Waterfall style deliveries has also become known as faith-driven development because it leaves so much to chance, and usually right until the end of the project.

To focus on value delivery, we have to shift our mindset to use adaptive planning versus predictive planning, something that we will talk about later in this chapter.