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Applying Agile in Your Waterfall World
Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.
Agile software development has been an interest of mine for several years. My last project involved developing an agile process model that could be integrated and adopted by enterprise IT organizations. While researching and developing the process model, I found several best practices that can also apply to a waterfall projects. Even if your current IT organization hasn’t adopted agile software development, your project team can still benefit from these agile project management best practices.
Agile PM Practice No. 1: Deliver with Iterations
A key practice in the agile delivery methodology is to deliver working code often. Instead of waiting months to see the software product, the project team delivers software in increments. These increments are designed, developed and tested in two- to four-week iterations. The culmination of multiple iterations constitutes a software release to the production environment.
In the waterfall world, the business customer won’t see the functional software product until the coding phase is complete and they engage in integration and end-user acceptance testing. By chunking the project schedule to deliver in iterations, the project team can successfully obtain feedback from the business customer and quickly validate they are on the correct path.
It is important to understand the iteration delivers functional …
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