Project management approaches – waterfall and agile

---

Summary: Different project management approaches, like Agile, Waterfall, and Scrum, offer unique ways to plan and execute projects. Choosing the right approach depends on your project’s needs, timeline, and flexibility. Waterfall follows a linear, step-by-step process, Agile focuses on flexibility and iteration, and Scrum is a framework within Agile for managing teams and tasks using a backlog.

---

To save you a Google search on project management approaches, here’s a summary that you may find helpful. There’s more than just Agile and Waterfall, but I’m highlighting these as they’re the most common in digital project management (and the ones that I can attest to).

Waterfall aka traditional 🏞

• Pre-defined scope at the beginning of the project
• Each stage happens in sequential order
• Structured and well documented

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Well documented and structured approach	Inflexible and less adaptable to change
Easy to understand timings, and determining a project schedule (who/when people need to be assigned)	Less client involvement throughout
Useful approach for a fixed price or scoped project	Scoping and design often done when we know the least about the project
Client knows exactly what they’re getting for their money	Harder to justify the request for more money. As you may often find that once more features have been built, decisions made earlier on in the project will need to be reworked. Which leads to a murky discussion of who wears that cost
Good approach if you’ve solved the same technology decisions before, and therefore don’t need to spend time experimenting and/or upskilling

The waterfall model is a breakdown of project activities into linear sequential phases, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one and corresponds to a specialisation of tasks. 

Wikipedia

Useful reading

• Waterfall methodology in project management
• Introduction to waterfall project management
• What should we know about traditional waterfall methodology

Agile 🔀

• Iterative and collaborative approach
• Multiple releases, releasing early and often
• Each stage is designed, developed and tested before moving on to the next

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Allows for greater client engagement throughout each phase of the project	Hard to budget and scope at the beginning of a project
You don’t waste time/money at the start of the project documenting or designing something that can’t be realised in development	Hard for clients to see value for money and understand what sort of end cost they’re looking at
Allows for continuous and iterative development	Technical debt can more easily accumulate
Flexible and adaptable to change in scope and requirements	Decreased quality in the end product when priorities misalign
Features a more accurately costed and monetary risk is shared

One thing that separates Agile from other approaches to software development is the focus on the people doing the work and how they work together. Solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams utilizing the appropriate practices for their context.

Agile Alliance

Useful reading

• The agile coach by Atlassian
• A comprehensive guide on agile methods for modern software development
• Agile software development
• The difference between Waterfall and Agile

Summary

As I’d mentioned in this post, no matter the approach you take you need to remain flexible and adaptable in order for it to work for you. A rigid approach may work in one setting, but another it might completely fail. My tip is to always ask yourself these questions along the way:

• Is this approach working for this particular project?
• Am I getting the most out of my team with this approach?
• Are we making things easier or harder for ourselves and/or the client?
• Is this approach costing us time and therefore money?

What approach do you prefer? I’m keen to hear from others, in the digital space but also in other industries. Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you! 💞