Why Project Planning Matters: Lessons from Experience

Many projects end up in a cycle of pending tasks, late-night work, and increased pressure due to a lack of proper planning. Key factors such as accurate estimations, well-structured user stories, sprint planning that aligns with the team's capacity, prioritization of features and fixes, and effective communication within the team all play a crucial role. When these aspects are neglected especially in environments where toxic leadership exists the project is bound to suffer.

To ensure smoother execution, every team member, whether a junior, fresher, or senior, should be involved in the estimation process and have a say in task assessments. This approach allows for more realistic planning, ensuring that work is assigned based on individual capacity, providing enough time for learning and implementation. It also results in high-quality deliverables with minimal errors.

When proper planning is ignored, regardless of business-level constraints, it leads to increased defects, longer completion times, and a stressful team environment. A good lead should be the voice of the team, advocating for their concerns rather than working against them. While they don’t have to agree with every opinion, they should be open-minded and analytical enough to understand the team's capacity and plan better strategies for success.

Feel free to put your opinions and suggestions/action items leadership can take to make this work. Comments on why this cannot happen (if any) are also welcome. I am looking for how this can be made into a plan of action, when a team lead is not so open-minded/takes opinions from the team. The way I see it now is, only the leadership can take the action item on this. Juniors can raise their voice, but sometimes it might affect them in some or the other way and turn out into politics.