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Planning - Mistake

When to use it

  • Use the whole loop when a team must invest through a quarter or longer, coordinate with other teams, or make a public commitment. It makes priorities, uncertainty, and trade-offs visible before delivery work begins.
  • Use a smaller version for a short, isolated task. State the outcome, scope, owner, next milestone, and check date; annual OKRs and a deep WBS would add ceremony without value.
  • The benefit is focus and earlier course correction. The team can connect daily work to an outcome and change a failing plan before the final deadline.
  • The cost is ongoing attention. A plan that is never reviewed is stale, while a plan reviewed too often becomes status theatre. Match the cadence to the risk and decision speed.

Common mistakes

  • Treating the yearly plan as a fixed backlog. New evidence, customers, and constraints will change during the year. Fix: keep the annual layer focused on a few strategic outcomes; use quarterly cycles to choose and revise the work.
  • Writing output as a key result. “Launch guided setup” can be complete even if no customer succeeds faster. Fix: name the user or business change and measure it, such as time to first report or successful-report rate.
  • Using too many OKRs. Every priority becomes no priority, and teams spread attention across work that cannot all finish well. Fix: choose 1–3 objectives and 3–5 key results for a cycle, then state what is not being pursued.
  • Making a plan before checking capacity. A roadmap can look possible while people are already committed to support, incidents, leave, or dependencies. Fix: start the team plan with real capacity, known obligations, and the people or approvals required.
  • Calling every ticket a work breakdown. A flat ticket list hides deliverables, duplicate work, and missing dependencies. Fix: start with the outcome, break it into deliverables or phases, then define work packages with owners and clear completion evidence.
  • Breaking work down until it becomes administration. Hundreds of tiny tasks make the plan costly to maintain and distract from the outcome. Fix: stop when a work package is small enough to estimate, own, and track; split again only when uncertainty or handoff requires it.
  • Ignoring work outside the happy path. Testing, rollout, measurement, training, support, security, and rollback are often missing from the first plan. Fix: review each deliverable with the people who must operate or support it, then add the required work explicitly.
  • Reporting activity instead of progress. “We completed 12 tickets” says nothing about the key result or a blocked milestone. Fix: report the metric, planned versus actual milestone, decision needed, risk, and next action.
  • Keeping a failing plan to protect the original promise. Teams can spend the rest of a quarter shipping work that no longer helps. Fix: predefine review points and use the evidence to continue, narrow scope, change approach, or stop.

Continue to Best Practise.