The Best of Both Worlds

Kevin Coleman is a highly skilled senior level project and program manager/advisor with experience leading projects with labor budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to multi-million dollar budgets across multiple industries.

  Agile   Estimating   Strategy  

If you have not run a hybrid project leveraging agile and waterfall methodologies, you are in for a great learning experience. My first brush with this came about five years ago. It was a challenge because the leader on the agile segment did not make an effort to work with the waterfall leader. She just wanted the waterfall users to change to agile. She was vocal about her position on a much-too-regular basis.

The same was true on the waterfall side. Both segments dug their heels in and resisted interactions with the other segment. As I am sure you realize, this became extremely problematic and negatively impacted the program both of these initiatives fell under.

A week or two into the program, it became all too apparent that the main reason behind the resistance was they were both totally unfamiliar with the other methodology. That unfamiliarity instantaneously grew into huge mistrust, miscommunications and friction between the project teams on both segments.

Let’s put the two distinctively different approaches into a broad and high-level context…

Agile
The agile approach to development is commonly referred to as a “solution” approach that was designed to overcome some of the shortfalls to the waterfall methodology. The agile methodology uses an iterative/incremental approach instead of the sequential waterfall approach. The work efforts …

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