Agile or Waterfall?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Governance   Portfolio Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Agile vs. waterfall is an important consideration in managing projects, but without a solid foundation the portfolio will fail to deliver the expected results regardless of how well an organization executes its projects. Here are four keys to driving results from project governance.

You can’t swing a project manager these days without hitting the debate of Agile vs. Waterfall. Both have established themselves as legitimate project execution approaches for the modern project driven organization. However, with all of this discussion about which approach is best, we seem to be losing sight of the fact that there are many decisions that need to be taken in the portfolio lifecycle before worrying about how to manage the project. In this white paper we look at how an organization can create an environment where it can make smarter Agile vs. waterfall decisions by introducing four rules that need to be followed before the Agile vs. waterfall decision is made.

For most organizations both Agile and waterfall approaches have a part to play in project execution.  Agile has demonstrated that it is more than a niche tool and has a track record of delivering business success that executives simply cannot ignore.  As more and more organizations are faced with a need to develop and / or customize software for their specific needs it follows that Agile will steadily increase its reach …

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