I am doing a fairly large project ( by my standards) and I have opted to take a agile approach to this; in that I will be doing the project in sprints.
There is no team, just me and my client, though some 3rd partys are involved in a small way. The development project ( a web shop ) arose from a large discovery project that I did for the client; and as such I have a lot of discovery information which is not necessarily organised as a development plan.
I need to get moving on this project and I don't want to plan the entire project from start to finish ( it may change mid stream anyway ) so what I did was to take the parts of the discovery that I need for the first iteration and plan those out ( and am currently working on that first iteration). I then will do the same for further iterations until the project is complete.
My problem is that doing it this way I will not have a critical path worked out because I am never planning the project as a whole, just each iteration. I know this may mean a delay in the project ( as I may be working on iteration 3 and end up at iteration 4 and find that there was something there that I should have started weeks ago eg get the client to add the products to the web shop or something ) but my question is that other than this is there any disadvantage to doign it this way and is there any better way of doing it ( given that my goal is to avoid planning the project as a whole at the start )
In short I think I am having difficulty understanding how critical path works out for an agile project or do with have multiple critical paths ( ie one for each sprint )