This post is more in the nature of a question than a statement. Predictive project management (e.g. waterfall) contemplates planning, task identification and estimation, schedule identification and estimation, risk identification, etc. Adaptive project management (e.g. Agile and Scrum) embraces change (often including late changes) and reduces the amount of planning up front (preferring elaboration through iteration). Let me say up front that I know some planning occurs in Agile up front, but understand it to be significantly less than in Waterfall. I have seen many conference sessions and various articles praising adaptive project management for legal, but I can't reconcile how adaptive project management produces a viable cost estimate at the outset. Given that we are asked to produce budgets routinely now for legal work, how does Agile support this? Is it planned in a predictive fashion, but then worked in an Agile fashion? Is Agile really only well-suited to hourly litigation that has broad fee ranges or no budget at all? In this linked
Harvard Business Review article, the author offers an approach to budgeting in Agile. My confusion stems from the result: the project will cost between $775k and $4.3M. That variance would be hard to tell a client. The article does go deeper into prioritizing requirements and identifying a way to get the project done given a budget of X, but that's not really the way most legal pricing occurs. The client does not say I have $2.5M to spend on this litigation, what can I get for it? Clearly, I am missing something and if anyone can tell me how budgeting with confidence can work in Agile, I will sleep easier.