InfoQ has a good recording of a session from the Agile 2009 Conference by Gerard Meszaros that details his experiences in planning and balancing JIT vs. deferred decision making. I am linking to it here and I recommend you take some time to listen to it if you are working in an environment as a PM in an Agile org.

What I wanted to also point out is my slight variation on his “Five Levels of Agile Planning”. Here are Gerard’s: Product vision, product roadmap, release plan, iteration plan, daily plan.

But in my experience, I don’t find daily stand-ups really to be a “plan”. That is much more JIT task-master work. From an Agile PM’s perspective, I would instead focus on these Five Areas of Planning: Portfolio Management, Product Roadmap, Product BRD, product backlog, release backlog. As a PM (program, project or product), your interaction at the release backlog may vary and may not be very deep. In fact, not all organizations following Agile methodologies use relase backlogs. More importantly, note that I included BRD in the list. I feel it is still important for someone in a “strategy” role, perhaps not a product owner, to own, document and detail product strategy in a BRD.

Lastly, I did want to mention that there is much more quality content in his session that you should check out and also that Gerard seems to slide between Scrum & XP throughout the talk.