My argument is that the things that waterfall specializes in, which is managing stages of work and dependencies between work is actually insignificant to the su

My argument is that the things that waterfall specializes in, which is managing stages of work and dependencies between work is actually insignificant to the success of projects people care about. Waterfall is good when you are building structures. But value exclusively comes from the integration, verification, validation, and deployment of structures. With these types of tasks, the variance in estimates exceeds the mean of those estimates. Effective workers constantly probe different pathways to success and this makes your project network, with its delineated stages and strict dependencies, totally divorced from reality. The outcome of knowledge work, is knowledge. Not story points allocated, not dollars spent, not time used. The best hope of having a project management approach with valid predictive power is to track knowledge earned and not EVMS metrics satisfied.