Rolling Wave Planning, Progressive Elaboration and Rolling Wave Planning Hi Josh, I am reviewing PM PrepCast again. I will be taking the exam soon. Right now, I am having trouble distinguishing between Progressive Elaboration and Rolling Wave Planning. This issue is not pass/fail, but it helps if you answer all the questions correctly. Could you please provide some definitions to help clarify this? The PMBOK guide definitions don’t help. An excellent question! Rolling Wave Planning Rolling Wave Planning is a type progressive elaboration. It would be great if you put it in a list along with other examples: Progressive elaboration (examples).

• Rolling wave planning (usually used in a waterfall project setting)
• Sprint planning (Agile).
• Kanban task decomposition: Start with larger deliverables and feature sets, then break them down into smaller pieces as they leave the backlog. They will go into the active value stream.
• Prototyping

Progressive Elaboration Progressive Elaboration simply means that you keep things at a high level for months and don’t attempt to guess the details. Scope is broad, but specific tasks are not yet known. Estimates are ROM (Rough order of Magnitude). As time moves closer, you will go through a planning effort to break down the vague, high-level plan into specific sub-deliverables and tasks. You can then have your teams execute these estimates. Planning Packages We use planning packages in my company when work is too far away and too unclear. These planning packages have ROM estimates that we are familiar with. Although we can identify the deliverables associated to a planning package, they may change as we get closer to implementation. Leave a comment below to ask questions or contribute $0.02