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waterfall methodology

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enterprise
School of Agile

Common Pitfalls When Implementing Scrum for Enterprise

Hey guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here. We have a pretty serious topic today.  Brad asked me this question on Quora. Thank you. That is an amazing question.

“What are the common pitfalls when implementing Scrum at an Enterprise?”

Yes, of course, nothing is really easy. I’ve been able to implement Scrum multiple times in Fortune 500 Enterprises. However, there are definitely some issues. What are the most common ones?

change

I’ll start with the biggest one right away  – stakeholders. In a Waterfall organization stakeholders often are very reluctant to accept the change. So whenever one department says they want to do Scrum, stakeholders  usually say, “We don’t want anything to change in our process. So, how we communicate with you should stay the same”.

How to solve this ? What I find very useful is to get a “round table” with them, explain the new process, explain the benefits, make sure they understand Agile  well – that helps a lot.

Second issue – people in a team who used to work in certain way for years. This might be challenging. To solve this you need to establish trust, and really explain the value of Agile.

The third challenging thing is  that even though teams have direction to move to Agile, many people don’t understand what Agile actually is.

In order for you to move teams through the Agile transformation, all people in a team need to understand what Agile is and some people need to evangelize Agile, otherwise, it just does not work. We are not talking only about developers here – your manager, his manager need to understand it as well.

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This third point is exactly why companies like Define Agile exist. Our main goal when transforming any team is to teach Agile to everyone, so that if you are doing Scrum, any team member can be a Scrum Masters, and others can pass the Agile knowledge forward.

So If you are planning to go through an Agile transformation , I would highly recommend you to hire a partner to do this. It is a very important step, and if done wrong, can demotivate everyone.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Anatoly

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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.

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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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