Agile Practices for Waterfall Projects

Shifting Processes for Competitive Advantage

Barbee Davis

• Publisher: J. Ross Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781604277326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Projects in the near future will be managed with a hybrid of Agile and traditional waterfall processes to better address the speed to market, product innovation, and financial challenges that organizations face. The project managers who learn how to merge Agile with Waterfall methodologies first will gain a huge career advantage over those who lag behind. This engaging and highly instructive guide covers what Agile is, and how and when it is appropriate to blend it into your projects. Agile Practices for Waterfall Projects will help new and experienced project managers, stakeholders, and students of the discipline to proactively prepare for and ensure their future success. This agile project management book is a valuable resource for all the terms and concepts needed for those planning to take the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) exam.

Why Agile Now?

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Project managers are like sharks. We have to keep swimming to keep alive and employable in a constantly evolving workplace. Despite our occupation’s solidified need to brace ourselves and our teams to avoid unnecessary changes, the reality of the future looms clearly: projects will be managed with a hybrid process of Agile (flexible) and formal (traditional) practices. So, we need to think about how to evolve our approach to managing projects. The project managers who are visionary and practical enough to learn how to do this will have a huge career advantage over those who lag behind.

To understand how to update our own skills in the most efficient matter, we will need to consider these five questions:

1. Why change our project culture now?
2. How do we blend new Agile ideas into familiar, traditional project management processes?
3. What additional skills do we need as project managers if we make these changes?
4. What background information and sales techniques do we need to convince those above, below, and next to us in the organizational hierarchy to support an evolution to Agile?
5. What changes need to happen in our organization to allow Agile and traditional approaches to merge?

Why now? The answer is obvious if you look around to see the challenges that organizations are facing in today’s economy. First, there is a tremendous push to accelerate the time to market. Second, we have to enhance our own ability, and that of our team, to manage quickly changing priorities and requirements. The world has changed dramatically, and there is too much competition to succeed by merely producing things faster and cheaper. We need to focus on adding innovation and creativity to our products and services.

Adding to these challenges is globalization, when in order to expand markets our organizations are opening branches all over the world, or perhaps adding remote teams in an attempt to reduce costs. These realities add the burden of managing projects and project teams within cultures foreign to our own, adding more layers to the stack of issues we already juggle on a daily basis.

Companies also face new issues of employee retention and engagement. Currently, with unemployment rates high in many parts of the world, people are staying put. But recent surveys estimate that about 60% of employees plan to look around once the economy stabilizes. Since these team members may not be invested in the company long term, it stands to reason that they may not be fully engaged and productive.

An additional consideration is the need to plan for New Millennium, or Generation Y, people coming into the workforce. When surveyed, their “work ethic” is self-fulfillment; they like collaborative leadership, and they view change as inevitable and increasing. This new generation of workers is already bringing a mindset tuned to Agile values with them. Rather than needing to educate and convince them to adopt Agile principles, the focus will shift to convincing them that our organization operates in harmony with a belief system that they already have.

The reason that we, as project managers, need to make our project processes more Agile, is not because it is the “flavor of the month,” but because it allows us to:

• Drive business agility,
• Respond to a fast-changing business environment,
• Increase alignment of projects to business strategies to create the best return on investment, and
• Impact employee hiring and retention issues.

We achieve these goals by becoming more flexible in the way that we manage projects. Do not be concerned that the word “Agile” has become connected to the software industry. In its pure form, the one we will use, it means to be more versatile and able to adjust quickly to change. Some organizations have been using Agile approaches for over 10 years with amazing success.

John P. Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, who is regarded as an authority on leadership and change, and James L. Heskett, professor emeritus of Harvard University, wrote Corporate Change and Performance. They examined more than 200 organizations, including Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, the Investment Company Institute (ICI), and Nissan. They found that in companies with a strong and adaptive Agile culture:

• Revenue grew more than 4 times faster,
• The rate of job creation was 7 times higher,
• Stock profits grew 12 times faster, and
• Profit performance was (take a moment and get a number in your mind, then read on) 750 times higher than those companies who were less nimble.¹ Would you guess even close to that number?

Thus, what we need to discover is a way to add Agile to organizations, but not wipe out the traditional processes sometimes known as “Waterfall” and replace them entirely, due to the huge investment we have in our current processes, training, and certifications. We can add the most appropriate parts of the Agile philosophy to specifically address some of the major problems facing our employers and ourselves, not only for software developers, but in all parts of the organization.

In recent years, there has been a heated debate between the Agile and Waterfall proponents, which often became quite passionate. On the one hand, the software development world has found a much needed solution to their woes in an Agile methodology, but other departments in the company may feel it is not robust enough to meet their needs. It is true, at first glance, that Agile and Waterfall may appear to be two competing, or even warring, project management approaches that would seem an unlikely mix. But when you know the evolutionary history of project management and the business theory on which it is based, it is easy to see that both Agile and Waterfall are more like loving siblings who come from the same hearty stock.

How do you justify moving to a more Agile technique when your company or industry is more heavily invested in a traditional project management approach? We need to remember that one of the most important focuses for all of us as project managers in today’s world is to be innovative. We all want to explore new ideas and find different ways to support our executive management and teams, and to find better ways to do projects. So what are the big project problems that Agile solves?

Three Current Project Questions

There are three big questions to ask about your current projects. Be honest! First, have you ever had a project finish pretty much on time and pretty close to budget, but after it was all over, the customer was not thrilled with what you delivered? With the Agile methodology, your customer is involved, sitting next to you, being a part of meetings from the beginning of the project to the end. The customer approves a few features and functions every 1 to 2 weeks. So, you are confident that you know exactly what they want before you build it. If they are unhappy or not totally pleased along the way, you know it immediately—in plenty of time to fix the problem.

Here’s the second question. Have you ever run out of time and money, but the project was not complete? If you answered yes, you are in the same situation as the majority of project managers. With Agile, you are working first on the features and functions that bring the most business value and are the most important to the customer. If you run out of time and money, and don’t get finished with the entire list of requirements that may appear to be ideal, at least you have a working product or service that includes the most valuable parts: finished, tested, and useable or sellable.

The third question: Did you ever feel you could solve a project problem better than your boss, but your corporate roles have such ironclad boundaries that you are not asked or allowed to be a part of solving problems or making suggestions? With Agile, you are part of a dedicated, self-organizing, self-directed, crossfunctional team that is authorized and empowered to run the project. The idea is that the people actually doing the work know the best way to solve problems that arise. Your boss, or even you as the project manager, have new roles—to remove obstacles and roadblocks to success for the project team. Most people are more motivated by achievement, by being appreciated and valued, and being free to work on interesting things, than by money. Today’s teams are made up of smart people. You do not need to hand out work to them one tiny bit at a time. For the most part, teams are capable, willing, and able to know what to do and do what it takes to get the work of the project completed. They can find solutions to hard problems on their own.

If you answered “Yes” to any of the three questions, you are an honest project manager. We have all had these things happen if we’ve spent any time actively working in the profession. If you have had any of those problems, you should consider adding Agile to your projects to create a hybrid approach. In fact, Agile is addressing and solving quite a few common project management issues. As you read further, you will probably see that many of your own or your team’s day-today frustrations can be solved, or even avoided in the first place, with a more Agile process.

Agile has been around for more than a decade, and most project managers have at least heard about it. Agile teams on average provide products and services faster, at a higher level of quality, at a lower price, and with more satisfied customers. And the people who work on these teams are happier and stay with the organization longer.

Agile simply means that you are more flexible in your approach to doing projects. You are able to adapt and change your project quickly when your project team, or your customer, finds it necessary. In 2008, the research group QSM Associates assessed the performance of 29 Agile development projects against 8,000 plan-based or Waterfall averages in three key areas: productivity, time to market, and quality. They found that the Agile projects were:

• 37% to 50% faster in delivering software to market,
• 16% to 35% more productive as a team, and
• Able to maintain normal defect counts despite significantly shorter schedules to complete the work of the project.²

Statistics such as these have captured the attention of management level decision makers around the world.

Project Management Certifications

Project management in a traditional fashion has been around in one form or another for over 100 years. You might hold a certification such as PMP^® (Project Management Professional), CAPM^® (Certified Associate in Project Management), PgMP^® (Program Management Professional), PMI-SP^® (Project Management Institute Scheduling Professional), or PMI-RMP^® (Project Management Institute Risk Management Professional).

If you are European, you might be a PRINCE2^® (Projects IN Controlled Environments 2) Registered Practitioner. There are hundreds of thousands of certified individuals who have had to work hard to learn PMI or PRINCE2 processes. They scheduled, took, and passed rigorous tests (perhaps after several tries). They worked to get additional training and experience to maintain their status, and most importantly, they used the principles successfully, for the most part, for a number of years.

A newer certification is the PMI-ACP^® (Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner). The Project Management Body of Knowledge—Fifth Edition includes Agile in a more integrated way than earlier editions. Just as there is a PMI Construction Standard, Government Extension, and Project and Portfolio Standard, to mention a few, you may see an Agile body of knowledge standard at some point to support the new PMI-ACP certification.

Be aware that among other criteria, the PMI-ACP requires experience working on projects using an Agile approach, or time spent on an Agile project team within the last three years, in order to qualify to take the exam. When you begin to include some of the new ideas in this book with your team, be sure to record those hours spent in order to meet the exam qualification requirement. You can view the other requirements at www.pmi.org.

Part of earning the PMI-ACP certification is a three-hour test, and once you pass it you need 30 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from training, or other experiential activities, to keep your certification active, rather than the 60 PDUs required by some of the other PMI certifications. If you are already a PMP certificant, the good news is that PMI-ACP PDU hours and PMP PDU hours can overlap. In other words, you can count the same hours toward recertification for both, as long as the subject matter of the training is appropriate.

So, that is the PMI-ACP certification, but what is Agile itself? Agile means that your team is more pliable. You are able to adapt and change the project quickly when the project team, the product owner, or the customer finds it desirable. The information technology world, in particular, is moving toward a more flexible approach to project management with fewer formal documents and less administrative overhead, while other parts of the organization may still use the more familiar, traditional project management processes.

Agile is in all of our futures. Even the most traditional project managers and organizations who insist on abiding by only the processes distributed by PMI will need to be ready to adjust their day-to-day actions. Agile is becoming mainstream, and all departments and industries are being touched. What can we learn from these new, Agile processes being used successfully by software developers? Is there a way that we can blend their new approaches into the more traditional project plans, which we as project managers must have to manage our own projects, to give us faster and more measurable results? How can we mix Agile ideas and processes into our more traditional Waterfall team’s current way of doing things?

One of the first concerns to surface when considering Agile is that organizations have spent a lot of time and money accepting, training, and implementing their current project management processes. So, they are going to be less than anxious to dump that all overboard and start fresh. Our goal is to keep what works about the traditional processes and augment what does not, ending up with a hybrid approach that uses the best ideas from each practice.

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