Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls: 2 Reasons to Avoid Waterfall, and 3 Better Approaches

Rob Saxon is a Project Management Professional, Certified Information Systems Auditor and a trained Six Sigma Specialist. Rob is currently developing methods to integrate project management into previously unexplored areas of business.

  Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Quality   Testing/Test Management  

There are many reasons why the waterfall approach does not work for most technology projects. Though many companies still use some version of the waterfall methodology to manage all projects, the fact is that the approach is arcane, outdated and essentially useless for software implementations.

Have you ever tried to walk or climb up a waterfall? I tried walking against a waterfall in Jamaica once, and it’s a pain to do. The waterfall methodology for projects is aptly named, because it is equally painful to try to go back to prior phases of a project once the effort has advanced to the next phase. This article will outline two reasons to avoid waterfall, and three ways to approach software projects that are more useful.

Reason 1: Construction projects are different from software projects.

“The cost of a thing is the amount of… life exchanged for it.” – Henry David Thoreau

The waterfall project methodology was created for construction projects, where the cost of rework is extremely high and the controls over phases need to be extreme. Consider if your company had just completed a building, and you discover that the foundation is not level, and is not made of durable material. The cost to rebuild the foundation (by, most likely, destroying the building,) is unbearably high. Therefore, the levels of design and inspection rigor need…

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