Most project models are sort of useless in the modern office environment. Waterfall is useless because nobody ever follows it. I agree that it’s sort of the “d

Most project models are sort of useless in the modern office environment. Waterfall is useless because nobody ever follows it. I agree that it’s sort of the “default” mode, but show me a project that didn’t go back and change something from a previous step. Agile stops working the moment you need to sign any form of contract with anyone, because nobody is going to sign a contract that doesn’t tell them what they are going to get for X amount of money. Its processes are sort of fine on the smaller scale because it breaks project tasks into neat to-do-lists, but it’s utterly useless for actual project management because estimates are a lie and delivering on time is what is required to drive a project successfully. Then there is everything in between from the various stage-gate models to UP and what not, and they are all equally useless because nobody ever really follows them and because they can’t really apply to every type or project which is what organisations tend to want. I haven’t worked in a FANG or whatever you call the big American tech companies, but I have worked in the European Public sector and it’s affiliated private sector companies for years, and nobody has a magic project model in my experience. In many ways the most successful companies tend to be the ones who simply use some sort of Kanban board and refrain from giving estimates in intervals lower than weeks. I fully understand why organisations waste resources on this area of course, I’ve been in the trap myself many, many times and I’ll likely end up in it again, but the simply truth is that every project manager or business process person that you have is one less developer, and these helper functions don’t really add anything to your value chain the moment they start making up work for the sake of having the “right” processes in place. The best way to handle project management is to hire good developers who know how to deliver projects that are build safely and maintainable. That’s not easy, but no amount of project management is going to make up for the lack of them. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t need project managers or have an organisational strategy, but if you’re hiring more support staff for your developers than you would for the tradesmen you’d hire to build your house then I think that you’re doing management wrong. We build an entire city hall, a process that took almost a thousand different employees from very, very, differently ones of work and we did it with 1 project manager, 1 architect and 10 lead engineers. We did it on time and under budget, and that is how we build our IT projects as well. It’s sort of waterfall, because it’s what we default to like the author gets into, but maybe that’s because it works?