Definition of a rolling wave

A quick search through Google turned up a couple of slides from the Max Wideman site:

http://www.maxwideman.com/issacons/iac1077/sld003.htm
http://www.maxwideman.com/issacons/iac1077/tsld002.htm

It looks like it is the same thing as Spiral Planning. Basically, a project is broken down into small mini-projects and each phase is planned and executed iteratively. Ie. the second phase is not planned until the first phase is complete.

Stacy
Participate at the Project Management Knowledge Base!

Gary,

Rolling Wave Planning is the conversion of Planning Packages (PP) into Work Packages(WP)during the different phases of a project. Rather than defining and baselining the complete scope of work in detail, the short term work is planned in detail and the far term scope is baselined at a higher (summary)level (Planning Package) thereby providing more flexibility.
Rolling Wave Planning is common to projects using Earned Value Methodology. I’ve successfully used this technique on several large projects by applying a window (3 months after time now)to future activities in the project schedule to identify these PPs. The PPs would then be defined into more detail or depending on float maybe replanned to occur later.
But a key to this process is to provide traceability by logging the changes and reasons.

Cheers,
Rob.

Gary

Rob’s hit the nail on the head.

I’ve used the technique extensively on projects where customer mandated the use of EVM. On one of the projects we were even paid by EV.

There’s a useful book on EV by Joel Koppelman (of Primavera fame) and Quentin Fleming. IIRC correctly it addresses the technique in relation to EV but there’s nothing difficult about it.

Regards