A lot has been written about agile philosophy and the related practices, values and principles which the agile team is required to follow agile software development commenced in late 1990s in response to failure of heavily up-front planned projects which left both customers and the teams frustrated and confused. The result of deliberations and innovations on the process aspect of the software development (aka SDLC), were a lot of initial process frameworks including Scrum, XP, V model, Agile Unified Process and more. The focus of these frameworks were small, shippable increments of functionality, quick feedback and a collaborative, team centric mindset. In 2001, the basic underlying principles were combined and collated in form of The Agile Manifesto and associated 12 agile principles. The movement has now grown to be the mainstream of Software development across the world and over 60% of all software development now happens using Agile practices. So how does Agility reflect in an Enterprise? What are the levels of Agility that the organization needs to look at to be successful? Agility is about continuity. It is not just a onetime trigger or a chance which when started can change the whole enterprise landscape in one go. Enterprise agility is a series of continued steps which need to be planned, triggered and sustained to make sure you don't just have stop-gap practices but a continuous enterprise agile testing.

Let's explore the aspect named continuous planning of enterprise agility specifically. Continuous Planning: Traditional Software development relied on big-upfront planning using Gantt Charts and Project Plans to make sure all areas of planning were covered and the Project Manager used to continuously monitor project health to make sure everything was on track. Anything beyond the scope defined in the Project Plan was taken as a change request. But the times are a-changing. Very few business lines can now afford to spend effort and cost in big upfront planning. The need of the hour is to hit the ground running at the earliest and beat your competitors to the market.

That is why Continuous Planning is the necessity for any enterprise. Your plan needs to reflect the current ground realities at all times and it should be easy to change the plan rather than a long cumbersome change request process. The planning not only needs to happen continuously at an iteration level but also at all levels of business to stay ahead of the curve and make sure your product/ service remains relevant in the market And remember the guru mantra: "Planning is important, Plan are useless".

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