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minimum viable product

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waterfall proj
School of Agile

Why do Waterfall Projects Fail?

Hi guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here. I keep on answering your questions. This one is from VJ. He asks, “Why do Waterfall projects fail compared to Agile projects?”

It is a great question. Before I start talking about Agile, I just want to tell you that this is not completely true.

First of all, some companies do Waterfall amazingly. It works for them and they don’t fail. They succeed and sometimes there are projects that Waterfall might be much better suited than doing Agile. For example, If you’re building a bridge, you know exactly how long the bridge is. You have all the requirements up front, Waterfall might be and ideal way to handle that.

architect

However, where Waterfall fall short is when projects are complex, where there are a lot of unknowns and it’s hard  to get all the requirements up front .

Time have changed significantly in the last 20 years. You can’t spend years gathering requirements anymore – you need to take action and deliver value as soon as possible.

Also, client mindset has changed. Clients want to see progress every week, they want to be part of the process.

Often clients just want you to prototype something and then see where it goes. They might not know what the next iteration will be. Waterfall does not accommodate dealing with change very well. It becomes very costly.

Hope that helps!

If you need my help to move your team through an Agile transformation, please click on FREE Consultation and lets talk!

manager

waterfall5
School of Agile

Agile versus Waterfall Methodology

Hello again, my friends. . Anatoly here from Define Agile. We’re discovering the world of Agile together, and today we’re talking about the topic that is a big one. Most of people are confused by it. Most people are asking lots of questions about it. What is the difference between Agile and Waterfall methodologies ? I will cover on a very high level.

If you look at the difference between Agile and Waterfall from the very high level – Waterfall is a project that you must delivery in full by Cretan date.  You go through stages of your project and in the end you deliver the whole project to your client. You know the scope, you know the budget in advance and itself  is very well defined.

Agile, on the other hand, is iteration-based. It’s you deliver a little bit of value – often. In Agile end scope might not have been defined and funding may not have been defined. You even don’t know if this is going to succeed or not. You’re just testing stuff up until you figure out what works, working with your clients and your team to iteratively delivery solutions to certain problems.

waterfall

Now, let’s go and look at the detail and look at different categories and how they stuck to each other.

Scope

Scope in Waterfall is very well defined. You have a contract of work that you need to do, you know exactly the whole scope from start to the end.

In Agile, you know the scope of the first iteration or several iterations ahead, got some vision, but you don’t know if you’re going to implement it in a certain way. You iterate and base your decisions on data.

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Funding/Budget

In Waterfall, funding and budgeting should be done up front. You gather requirements, and get your budget for the whole project.

In Agile, your funding might be for a certain iteration. And then you’ll see, if you have enough traction with your product, you may put more funding. Since the end scope is not defined, the funding can be as big or as little as you want it to be or as the market receives your product.

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Client Interaction

In Waterfall, you interact with your clients at the start, you plan everything with them and then you might have some touch points to see, if you are on track, to deliver this contract of work that we decided right away. There should not be any surprises with the client. If stuff changes, there might be a little tweaks but they need to change all that funding and you need to change the scope and stuff like that. So, it’s a big work if any change is happening.

In Agile, you constantly talk to your clients. You deliver a little bit, the client looks at it, if they like it then you move on. If they don’t like it, you  repeat the same process until client is satisfied. i

 

 

This is my quick rant on Agile versus Waterfall. It was a very high level overview of those two just to get your feet wet in deciding which one to choose.

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