Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

There is an innate aversion to wasted effort. Nobody really wants to do something, only to find that they have to start all over again because what they did was not what was really wanted. In response to this aversion, people are naturally inclined to do more up-front planning. “If they just would have asked for what they really wanted, we could have delivered it, and it would have saved so much time!”

It’s true. If the development team were handed a detailed plan, and the plan were perfect, they would avoid a great deal of rework that happens when plans change. We all know it is true. And so, instinctively, we resist change, instead trying to push for “getting it right the first time.”

What we don’t always realize is that you could probably build it 3 times, two a total waste of effort, in the same time that it would take to plan to get it half-right. Yes, that’s right, there is something gained in doing it even if it’s wrong.

“What is gained in doing it wrong?” you ask? The short answer is “perspective.” You want to get from A to Z. A is where you are. Z is where you want to be. You think you know how to get there. Or maybe you don’t, but you know that the first thing you need to do is go from A to B. Once you have gotten to B, your position has changed, and so has your perspective. Now you have something tangible to look at, and that may reveal to you that Z isn’t over here, it’s actually more like over THERE. And now, it is a little more clear that the next step in the progression is C. Suppose it turns out that C didn’t get you any closer to Z. It was a waste, right? No. You have something tangible that you can point to and say “From here, we need to go in THAT direction.” It is the hardest thing in the world to say “I want to go in THAT direction” when there is no frame of reference. Giving yourself a frame of reference will accelerate progress by orders of magnitude more than the time wasted doing it the ‘wrong’ way. Besides, who says you won’t use C later on for something else?

So, a truly agile team, both in form and in mindset, welcomes change. Because when the roadmap is changing, that means that forward progress is being made. It means that previous unknowns are no longer unknown. The mature team realizes that if things aren’t changing, it could well mean that somebody isn’t paying attention to what you are doing. And that doesn’t bode well for anyone.