We must recognize that our original plan was based on noisy data, viewed from a long time-horizon. For example, we may have started development believing a feature would take 1 week of effort and it would be valued by 50 percent of our customers. As we progressed through development, we may have discovered that this feature will require 10 weeks of effort and it will only be valued by 5 percent of our customers. This is a factor of 100 change in its cost-to-benefit ratio. This emergent information completely changes the economics of our original choice. In such cases, blindly insisting on conformance to the original plan destroys economic value.