Replacing Favorable with Unfavorable

Overview

Many organizations are moving from Waterfall to Agile for various reasons. That may be to deliver projects on time and within budget, to shorten the time-to-market, to increase productivity ,to be able to scale to larger or distributed projects, or to increase quality. Or, again, simply because the CEO heard someone from Gartner saying that Agile is great.

In all cases, the road will contain some hurdles. Sometimes very difficult ones. Remember that implementing Agile correctly isn’t easy. The organization isn’t always ready and possibly neither are the people in the organization. Although research shows that Agile projects are more likely to succeed than traditional projects, this doesn’t mean that all Agile projects will be successful.

There will also be Agile projects that won’t deliver what’s expected. Unfortunately, however, upon the failure or partial success of the first Agile projects, various organizations tend to move away from Agile very quickly. At one pension fund, we’ve even seen that the first Agile projects were highly successful, but the project managers returned to Waterfall for the next project simply because they were accustomed to it.