Stakeholders: Project Manager, Agile Coach, Developer

How does our project deliver the desired functionality on time and within budget? Traditionally, the project manager creates the plan, divides the work, supervises the planning, manages risks, and reports on progress. In short, the traditional project manager has the final say. It’s their project.

Traditional project managers aren’t fond of Agile:

• Waterfall works as long as we don’t allow changes. Unfortunately, changes can’t be eliminated.
• We’ve been using Waterfall for years successfully. Numerous studies show that 70 to 80 percent of all Waterfall projects fail.
• If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. That said, do our projects really deliver the desired functionality on time and within budget?
• We don’t actually use Waterfall anymore. We’ve been working with Agile. We’re not saying it isn’t true. Unfortunately, we have noticed that in many organizations where project managers make these statements, Agile is applied only in name.
• We do Scrum. We’ve almost finished the analysis and the plan of what to do in each iteration. Once the analysis is approved, we iterate on design and development. Often, these are well-intentioned project managers that think they might be using Agile but are actually applying Waterfall.