For an Art Project should I go Waterfall, Hybrid or Agile?

Think you can compare your question to 'should I paint the walls brown or yellow?'. Maybe you find an answer but it is not really relevant for your purpose.

And in the case of agile vs waterfall the answer is always hybrid, which means you do whatever is suited for the current situation and follow a wider purpose, goals and roadmap.

As a startup, there is a lot of advice what to do in the beginning and later once you survived. The beginning should focus on finding engaged customers/champions, not creating a product out of your imagination. The champions will tell you what they need, like and expect from you. From there you can go. A good read is Steve Blank's 'The four steps to epiphany'.

Good luck.
Thomas

Startups can benefit from an adaptive approach if you wish to test the viability of either your business offering OR the approach to deliver that offering. Eric Ries's book The Lean Startup is a good grounder in that approach.

Aside from that, no two projects are the same within any domain or industry. An adaptive approach might work for one whereas a predictive approach would work for another. The key is to "profile" your project's context to determine where along the continuum from 100% predictive to 100% adaptive does your project fall.

PMI's Agile Practice Guide provides some guidance for such profiling, and the Disciplined Agile toolkit also provides a flowchart to help with the decisioning around life cycle approaches.

Kiron

In a case like yours, I would consider a hybrid approach essential. The project planning and the gallery to display the projects are two different animals, and there are typically different people creating the content to display, and gallery itself.

For my own projects, I need some type of waterfall planning because there are absolutely dependencies that need to be actively managed in order to meet deadlines The insides need to be done before the outsides can enclose them. Some things need to cure or dry resulting in idle time. If I need materials, special tools, etc. they must be planned in advance. I am constantly working with my own network diagrams to ensure I have considered my critical path and can manage my time effectively. Not everything goes as planned so I often find myself re-planning short duration activities, and including incremental and iterative updates/improvements.

Website development is a natural fit for agile approaches. You don't need perfection to start and can add functionality as you grow. You could start with off the shelf eCommerce platforms until you learn your own requirements as the sales portal customer, and then transition to your own site where you accept the IT costs, but avoid the 3rd party fees.

Startups commonly need agile tailoring, since the constant changes of the market force to adapt the initial plans to the recent customer preferences, but there may be some basic steps that can be planned using the traditional waterfall form. So the best is to adopt a Hybrid Approach.
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