We bought a house this month and it's an old property in need of lots of renovation. I'm talking walls, floors, new bathroom, kitchen, garden. It's a lot of work and we'll do quite a lot of it ourselves.
We also don't have a lot of time to do everything since we need to move in by the end of the year. It may seem like a long time. It's not. A few months barely puts a dent into the amount of work this house needs.
So naturally, I approached the project like I do any other project.
- Create a backlog of all the items
- Prioritise the backlog items
- Setup the visual management tool
- Plan the first sprint
It was all going swell. I was quite proud of the wall of sticky notes in the kitchen, each with an estimate, a priority, colour-coded. Awesome.
Until we started work.
The first item was taking down the old wallpaper. We expected that to go smoothly. We had the right tools and we knew what we had to do. But we didn't know there would be a thick layer of extra paper underneath the wallpaper. And that tick layer would not come off easily. Or at all.
So that threw all estimates out the window.
We didn't know what we didn't know.
And this is the thing. You can make as many plans to fix things as you want. No matter how detailed, there will be things you won't expect. Things you didn't know you had to know.
In web accessibility as well, this makes plans a bit counterproductive. A few reasons for this:
- Web technologies evolve faster than you expect.
- Rigid plans will stress you out when you don't follow them.
- You can't fully understand the depth of the problem before you start working on it.
What seems like a solid accessibility plan today will quickly become outdated as new devices, browsers and browser features come out. Your plan might already be obsolete and you'll be forced to constantly revise and update your strategies. This leads to wasted resources and frustration.
When you're too focused on following a predetermined plan, you may miss opportunities to adapt to user feedback in real-time. I'd pick a flexible, iterative approach that prioritises user testing and feedback over strict adherence to a plan any day.
This isn't to say plans are useless. I just find them more useful when they naturally form as you start working on the problem. As you eliminate more of the unknowns.
With web accessibility, and with house renovations as well, you can't fully define the problem without starting to work on it.
You have to have a bit of faith that eventually you'll get to the other end of the tunnel.