Yeah, I think this level of planning has gotten lost in our recent fad of agileness.
Senior management thinks they know where they want to be in 3 years, but there is no cascading multi-quarter, let alone multi-year planning of the projects & steps to get there.
I've even been in orgs where someone senior is trying to make very very large org & tech changes, and really can't be bothered to put the big building block steps to get from here to there. As it turns out, they never get "there".
Somehow they know enough to bring in project managers for big concrete things like "retire a datacenter" and go all out with MS Project, GANTT, etc.
However when it comes to software changes like "split an on-prem Java monolith into a fleet of python micro services in the cloud" ... it's all iterative vibes the whole way.
Agileness is many things but I really think we can stop thinking of it as a ‘recent fad’ by now. The manifesto was written 22 years ago. It’s been the dominant mode of engineering organization for over a decade.
Senior management thinks they know where they want to be in 3 years, but there is no cascading multi-quarter, let alone multi-year planning of the projects & steps to get there.
I've even been in orgs where someone senior is trying to make very very large org & tech changes, and really can't be bothered to put the big building block steps to get from here to there. As it turns out, they never get "there".
Somehow they know enough to bring in project managers for big concrete things like "retire a datacenter" and go all out with MS Project, GANTT, etc.
However when it comes to software changes like "split an on-prem Java monolith into a fleet of python micro services in the cloud" ... it's all iterative vibes the whole way.