The Waterfall Relevance

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Agile   Governance  

Portions of the following information was provided at the courtesy of New York State CIO/Office for Technology, Copyright 2003.

As project managers plying our trade in the new social media era, we have been continuously exposed to the advantages of agile project management techniques through the time and tested Waterfall methodology. Commercial organizations had already moved their focus to various agile methodologies like Scrum, DSDM and FDD, with Scrum evolving as the most favored method for managing projects efficiently--and in keeping with a dynamic market culture. Recently, federal entities--those who had always shied away from newer methodologies--have started eyeing agile as a methodology to manage their mission-critical projects. In short, agile adoption has reached a fever pitch where both commercial and government entities are seeking a faster and more robust implementation roadmap.

This exciting shift in the project management methodology preference brings a question to the fore: What are the options that we still have for managing enterprise projects the old-fashioned way, namely the so-called Waterfall method? Many organizations still follow this mature PM methodology and are resistant to a major change due to compliance-related constraints. Smaller organizations who might be looking for stable project management practices might find proven Waterfall …

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