On one of my Slack groups, I was recently asked:

How do you create a plan for a team as in what will be delivered when?

Here’s my answer:

In general, there is no way to know what will be delivered when. This is just a fact of life in software delivery.

So the challenge is determining how to deal with this reality.

The best approach is usually to just determine what single, small piece of work is most valuable to the client, customer, or business, and do that first. Then repeat.

By doing so, you’re guaranteed that you will always have delivered the most valuable software given whatever time frame you have.

Of course this approach is not without its challenges. If it were easy, there’d be no need for people like me to help teams achieve fast, reliable software delivery.