> but I fail to understand what the alternatives looks like besides Waterfall or chaos. What I've seen pretty much my entire career (early 80's) for projects i

> but I fail to understand what the alternatives looks like besides Waterfall or chaos. What I've seen pretty much my entire career (early 80's) for projects is just a straightforward process of up some front planning, phased design+dev, management of tasks through a regular (weekly or twice weekly) low overhead process (what's ready for next step, where are challenges), etc. The key is having an experienced technical leader to guide the process. Typically, PM's don't have enough detailed technical experience to really understand how to make this stuff work.