Anything but 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.

  Agile  

I’ve recently been doing quite a lot of work around agile, and specifically why organizations are choosing to implement agile approaches into their organizations. It’s been a generally positive experience, but there have been a few things that have given me some concerns.

Chief among these is that a number of organizations have described situations where they are looking to agile simply because their current traditional approach simply wasn’t working. I am more than willing to accept that people look to agile to be more effective than a waterfall-based approach, but to move to agile only because the current approach is failing strikes me as shortsighted. In this article, I want to try and identify at least a few things to check in those situations to try to ensure that agile is a success.

Understand the problem
If an organization’s projects are currently experiencing high failure rates, then it’s natural to look at the project execution methodology as the cause of the problems—after all, it’s the common factor across all initiatives. Before discarding it though, carry out some due diligence on the entire project execution environment. Are the problems truly spread across the entire organization or only certain areas? Is there a common theme to the projects that are successful, even if it’s only a handful?

Once you…

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