Don’t use any named, taxonomic workflow process at all. Not Agile, not Scrum, not Kanban, not Waterfall, not RUP, nothing. Instead, organically mix and match a

Don’t use any named, taxonomic workflow process at all. Not Agile, not Scrum, not Kanban, not Waterfall, not RUP, nothing. Instead, organically mix and match and customize any bits or pieces of any of them, along with ad hoc, situation-specific workflows, as needed — as determined by the specific situation, deadline, requirements, personnel and preferences involved. If you’ll benefit from spending time on exact software estimates or a retro meeting, do it. Two months later if people need to take a month for a more complex prototype, rendering 2-week increments silly and wasteful in terms of overhead, then change how you work and skip those parts for a while. When process is fixed by any prescriptive method that at the heart attempts to track progress and dictate one specific cadence or manner of working and communicating about progress, it devolves to something like fractal measurements of the coast of Britain. You think your measurements are getting more and more precise, and you can come up with whatever surface area of progress to make it look like you are measuring more and more. But no matter what, it becomes about the prescribed system, and stops being about common sense, fluid, adaptable, day-by-day adjustable workflow tailored to what trusted workers are telling you they need. Creative mental labor is just not amenable to Taylorism. It just doesn’t work. Doesn’t matter which Fancy Name you give it. You have to give up the idea of any fixed, prescriptive method, and just use constantly-updateable local conventions. (Of course this assumes you are interested in productivity. Often the bureaucratic adoption of things like Agile is about creating middle management surface area for political power struggles and/or corporate surveillance. Companies agree to pay the cost of productivity lost to the workflow drag in exchange for creating Dutch books of story points or to be able to roll up what are effectively contextless time sheets to executives who believe it equates to some type of accountability. I don’t have much advice in these cases; only interested when the assumption is to optimize productivity.)