Planning and estimation strive to anticipate and shape future events from an imperfect understanding of the current situation, the desired outcomes, relevant historical information, and the actions required to achieve success. Planning and estimating must discover, focus on, and document assumptions about key unknowns, develop hypotheses about current and future constraints and their likely impact on the course of the project, and translate these assessments into action plans and affordable resource allocations.

These plans must launch the project with focused momentum directed towards the project's vision and objectives, with monitors to build speed appropriately, proactively manage non-conformant work as it arises, and preserve options to tune the velocity vectors of selected tasks throughout the project's time horizon. Such self-correcting project controls are essential to navigate to the project's target successfully, across unknown territory, while carrying as big a payload as possible.