Aug 21, 2009
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Waterfall Beats Agile for Visibility on Projects
Different project management techniques impact the type of information you can collect on projects and therefore the level of visibility you have on your processes - both for single projects as well as for reports across all projects.
One of the advantages of a more classic, Waterfall approach, is that time is a variable that can shift and be measured. With this approach you:
- create a task list or work breakdown structure,
- assign resources,
- assign estimated hours,
- enter start dates and due dates for each task.
Then, you can measure how long it takes to actually complete the tasks in several dimensions.
- First, in terms of calendar dates: when the task was started and when it was completed.
- Secondly, you can measure in terms of duration: the number of days it took to complete.
- Thirdly, in terms of actual hours: the amount of people hours worth of effort it took to complete the task.
When measured and kept over time it creates a robust data set that can be used to improve estimates on projects.
If you bill by the hour or by project, this data can help improve your pricing and profitability by providing visibility into the actual time it takes to do the tasks or projects you are charging for.
If you bid on projects, this same data will improve your understanding of the variables you can look at when pricing your bid.
In a more Agile project management approach, time is generally held constant and it is the functionality or amount of work that shifts. The amount of work that can be accomplish shifts according to the time allocated, the skill set of the team and the complexity of the work involved.
This can provide a benefit for the project manager -they don’t have to worry about schedules and effort estimates in the same way as a Waterfall approach. It also makes it easier to track progress and shut out distractions for the team.
However, it comes at a price of reduced visibility and decreased data for management to use to make strategic decisions. The variables often left to management for decision making then become ones of:
- hiring more people,
- working on the team’s skill set,
- firing people or
- limiting project scope to the constraints of the team’s historic performance over a fixed period of time.
It limits the information that can be generated from projects and therefore the data that can be used for strategic decision making, portfolio management or long term planning.
