Like many books on agile, much of this book's ideas and tips are only useful if you are using an agile process with sprints, small tasks, team sprint planning and other features of popular agile methodologies. If your team only uses some elements of agile or is using a lighter weight agile approach such as kanban, it is less useful.

Part 1: The Problem and the Goal

A good overview of the purpose of planning. I took away two points: the process of planning is more important than the plan itself, and a plan needs to be a living document if it is to remain useful throughout the project. As a consequence of these two principles, plans should not be laid out in detail from the beginning. Instead, plans should be as detailed as needed any any given time. For example, in a traditional agile flow, the next sprint will be broken down into tasks small enough to work on while future sprints may only have a rough sequencing of features planned.

Part 2: Estimating Size

Overall, I would recommend [b:Software Estimation|93891|Software Estimation Demystifying the Black Art|Steve McConnell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328830202s/93891.jpg|90512] by [a:Steve McConnell|3307|Steve McConnell|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-M-50x66-f6689175dd57c0b1f6246d198a230cae.jpg] over this book. This section Cohn's book goes into a bit more depth on story points, ideal days, and planning poker than McConnell's book, but overall the content in Cohn's book is a subset of that in McConnell's book.

This book did give some interesting insights into re-estimating. Re-estimating has two purposes: to provide better estimates based on current data and to learn for future estimating. Inaccurate estimates and re-estimation should not be treated as failures. Individual estimates are rarely accurate, it's the aggregation that becomes more reliable. Another reason not to treat re-estimation as failure is that it discourages honest estimation in the future. Given these two purposes of re-estimation, it's rarely worth tracking how well individual estimates matched actual work done.

Part 3: Planning for Value

This part of the book covers figuring out what to do. The chapters on prioritization were useful. Since I am not in an environment where I have to directly worry about financial prioritization, I found most useful the discussion of estimating based on desirability.

In addition to the common knowledge that priority should depend on the "ratio" of desirability to effort, the book discusses how to assess desirability. ("Ratio" is in quotes since desirability is even harder to quantify than effort.) My key takeaway was that to decide how important something is, we should ask two questions: "how happy would you be with this feature?" and "how unhappy would you be without this feature?"

It might seem like these two questions would yield inverse answers, but consider a feature like saving in a text editor: if you just asked people how happy it would make them, it would likely get a middling score, but people would be very unhappy if their editor couldn't save. These are the features that are taken for granted, the things which would be deal breakers if you didn't add them. By only asking the first question, these features might be missed.

Part 4: Scheduling

Not particularly useful if you don't use an iteration based agile process.

Part 5: Tracking and Communicating

Also not so useful if you don't use an iteration based agile process.

Part 6: Why Agile Planning Works

A good summary of the book. Many of the highlights of the book can be gleaned from this one chapter section.

Part 7: A Case Study

Brought everything together nicely. It doesn't show how to deal with things going wrong, but since the purpose was to demonstrate the ideas to reinforce them, that is reasonable. ( )

Continuing the author's series of must-read books, "Agile Estimating and Planning" clearly, quickly, yet thoroughly takes you through the topic, imparting techniques and judgement on optional variants, along with aposite insights into how these techniques contribute to making Agile processes more effective than rivals.

And if that's not enough for you, I think the book might be worth the price just for the quotes that head off each chapter:

Planning is everything. Plans are nothing.

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

In a good shoe, I wear a size six. But a seven feels so good, I buy a size eight.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. ( )

http://www.stickyminds.com/books.asp?ObjectId=826&Function=DETAILBROWSE&... ( )