Waterfall Vs Scrum – what is better?

Waterfall advocates that we do a significant amount of design upfront. But it’s not possible to do it all up upfront. That never happens in any traditional project.

Scrum advocated that we should not over design as the customers/user doesn’t know what they want. Therefore spending time investigating would be wasted. Let’s build it and as we develop, check with the customer to see if it’s what they want.

Importantly, Scrum is not a series of mini waterfalls where we design for a few days and then build then test the next few days. We should do the design, develop and test at the same time. Removing the upfront design effort and merging it with the build. Chances are, it will take the same amount of energy to design and build, but it will be what the customer wants – better quality. And we have maximised the amount of work not-done by not delivering what the customer did not need.

But what about the long-term planning, a lot of the longer term planning goes out the window. But Scrum does not account for the fact that there is still some longer-term planning required. For example, it may take the supplier three months to provide the interface design or organise the training days at least two months in advance. You are going to have to implement some traditional planning to get this right. Agilest might call this release planning; traditionalists might call it program management. I think they are more or less the same thing – both aim to link organisational strategy to tactics.

Both traditional project management and agile-scrum are trying to tackle the “getting it done” part of the business. A business needs to recognise the tactics for change. However, they approach it in a different way. Traditional Project Management suggests that we can deliver on the tactics by planning, setting the rules and measuring progress. The tactics for an agile-scrum help a team share the goals and empower them to get it done – now.

So what will work better, empowering the team or measuring the activity? You decide based on the complexity of the task and the engagement levels of staff.

Althris provide training in Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner, Agile and Iterative Project Management Methods.