I love analogies. Here’s another one!

Let’s say you have a house, an older house: 30, 40, maybe even 50 years old. And it’s having electrical problems; lights flicker, outlets don’t all seem grounded, switches don’t all work. If you brought in a highly experienced and skilled electrician, that person could probably, within about 45 seconds of conversation with you, already know what would need to be done. Replace outlets, replace switches, replace light fixtures, rebuild the breaker box, and so forth. And probably could give you a fairly close estimate for the work.

Now granted, it’s not exact. And here’s where it starts to break down in terms of customer communication and expectation management. Are you, as the homeowner, comfortable enough to move forward with getting the work going? Or do you want an even MORE detailed breakdown of the work? “How many outlets, exactly? What color outlets? What gauge wire? What brand and amperage rating of each breaker?”

Well, guess what…we do the same thing with software and IT projects. You can bring in an experienced and skilled web app development team and get them going with an explanation of the business outcome, and start iterating. Or you can go back and forth before they start work, insisting on more and more detail on the tech stack, deployment model, maybe even UI mockups.

That type of upfront, overly-detailed planning has been shown, by decades of hard-won experience, to not be effective. Invariably there are emergent requirements, or evolved outcomes, or business requirement changes, that render a lot of that work moot. Whereas a skilled team, working in an agile manner, will build things in a flexible way and be able to adjust as things change. We’ve also learned that getting a working product, even missing features, is the best way to surface emergent requirements and also validate capability with the end user.

If you have a legitimate, experienced, and skilled electrician who has rewired hundreds of houses and has all those happy customers, then a trusting and communicative customer can allow them to work their magic and trust that they will get a successful outcome.