This past wednesday I attended the Philly ALT.NET user group meeting and got a chance to see Dave Laribee present on "Planned Agility".  Dave did a great job introducing how to do planning as part of your agile process.  Many people unfamiliar with agile think that planning isn't a part of the agile process, which of course is not the case. 

Planning happens at many levels within an agile process.  The primary types of planning that we do within our agile process are:

• Daily planning: Daily standup meetings start the day and help us figure out what we're going to be working on for the day.  We also evaluate where we are within the iteration and evaluate whether we're on schedule to deliver all the business value that has been agreed to, or whether we need to make small adjustments to meet our goals.
• Iteration planning: At the start of every iteration we have a meeting to discuss what business value the iteration is going to focus on, and then figure out what we can accomplish within the iteration
• Release planning: This is primarily done by our product owner and his team of business analysts.  A lot of discussions occur that help prioritize the features within a given iteration, as well as the scope of those features.  As work progresses within our iterations the release plan is adjusted to add and remove items.
• Product planning: Again primarily done by our product owner, this is the longer term planning that is done to lay our the longer term roadmap for the product, and to schedule the releases that are defined as part of the release planning.

Although it's not a planning activity per se, one of the other key things that often times affects our planning is our retrospectives.  Retrospectives may well be the most important activity within any agile process.  Without retrospectives we tend to fall into a rut, lose track of the problems and inefficiencies within our process, as well look past the ways that we could be improving our team, our software, and our code.  Our retrospectives often lead to planned activities and/or meetings that go into our next iteration planning session.   If you're not doing retrospectives, start.

Planning is an extremely important part of any agile process.  If you're doing agile without planning you're doing something wrong.  I suggest you try and catch Dave's presentation on "Planned Agility" at one of the upcoming conferences he's presenting at.