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The extremes were bad, not the essence of the idea. Stay lightweight and you can have the best of everything. When anything is non-trivial to implement, i.e. i
by buro9 5y ago
The extremes were bad, not the essence of the idea. Stay lightweight and you can have the best of everything.
When anything is non-trivial to implement, i.e. it has dependencies, then it benefits from _some_ waterfall planning. Meaning to think before the work begins about the approach being taken, all of those dependencies, and who you need to engage and when... tada, you've made a GANTT chart in your head and are now waterfall because you put some thought into the dependencies and the order of execution.
Within that, each epic / task can be SCRUM or agile or whatever... all you really need here is an idea of a "definition of done", to prioritise the work so that you hyper-focus on just doing what needs to be done to get you to done. You probably want to continuously remind yourself of those priorities... tada, you've created an agile process.
The names are irrelevant, understand the essence of project / program management and do the least you can do execute on that.
It's when the processes become formal, tooled up, etc... this is when the worst creeps in. The status meetings for middle management, the reporting of time to project management tools. But no-one has to do this, lightweight project management can work without any of this stuff.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago> then it benefits from _some_ waterfall planning. Meaning to think before the work begins about the approach being taken, all of those dependencies, and who you need to engage and when... tada, you've made a GANTT chart in your head and are now waterfall because you put some thought into the dependencies and the order of execution. Agile does not mean that you should forego all of this and code first, think later. What you describe does not oppose Agile and Waterfall.
- buro9 5y agoI know :) But people did take agile to an extreme and they did forego the essence of other processes. I feel that the line "everything in moderation" applies well to project management. Moderation being the key part.
- HelloNurse 5y agoThe "extremes" are good in their appropriate extreme niche: spacecraft flight control software is definitely engineering and it has to be perfect the first time (no exploration or iteration), while the only prudent and efficient way to publish a website with a day's notice requires a rushed MVP and then as many small edits and additions as fit in the available time. In the middle of the spectrum there are varied tasks, for which an excess of waterfall can force the creation of low-value documents (e.g. hundreds of pages of up-to-date screenshots of complex forms instead of describing in detail only interesting data and interesting workflow and honestly stating that UI layout will be arbitrarily reorganized according to stakeholder feedback after every demo until they are happy) and an excess of agility can be an obstacle to correct design (e.g. publishing a mock incomplete version of some service without taking a couple of days to determine whether the data needed to actually implement it is going to be available).