Every business owner should have excellent decision-making powers as it is the decisions that will shape your firm’s fate.
From choosing the right candidate to selecting the right market, every decision made by a firm owner should be precise, and the same goes for the type of project management approach you choose.
There might be many project management approaches out there, but the two most recognized approaches are agile and waterfall.
But which one is better? This is a million-dollar question for most firms to deal with. On one side, there are big teams, multi-year projects involving many firm units.
In contrast, on the other side, you get scalability, quicker go-to markets, adaptability, and faster value realization.
If you are planning to move forward with a one-size-fits-all approach, you will make the biggest mistake of your life.
What is more crucial here is to use a comparative approach in which the firm’s ecosystem is considered.
But the main question is, which one of these two project management approaches should you use? Let’s figure this out with this blog post.
What’s the Reason Behind the Growing Popularity of Agile?
By looking at the modern-day industries, you realize that the agile approach to project management has become the secret ingredient of success for most firms.
A gigantic base of project managers and firms are flocking towards agile methodology.
Agile has first introduced about fifteen years ago in the form of a substitute for traditional software development approaches.
But soon, all the firms moving to agile realized that this approach is more customer-centric and helps in improving the collaboration between team members.
The agile approach might have been around for more than 15 years, but firms have realized the true potential of agile only during the last five years.
After gaining traction in the market during 2008, there was a sudden rise in the adoption of the agile mindset.
If you are dealing with a complicated process, consider exploring the agile approach to project management and simplify the project in the best possible way. What makes agile better than a waterfall?
The increasing use of agile methodology is overcasting the popularity of the waterfall method, and firms using the waterfall method are slowly abandoning it.
We can say that the waterfall method focuses more on the process, and therefore, the user of the waterfall method can easily track every stage of the project.
There is also a sequential model used in the waterfall method, and this model goes from analysis of requirement, designing, implementation, testing, and production to complete maintenance.
But on the other side, the agile methodology offers accountability, visibility, adaptability and delivers value at the beginning of the process.
This type of approach helps the firm in reducing the risk factor while managing the project.
If you are a part of the software development world, you must be aware of how frequently plans change according to the changing demand of customers.
But since the waterfall method is completely sequential, it cannot deal with frequent changes in the process.
On the other hand, the agile methodology uses an iterative approach that is highly adaptive to changes.
The perks of using agile over waterfall
- Words like complete project failure become meaningless in the world of agile. Agile means always having a working product that is built from the beginning of the initial sprint. This is the main reason why projects based on the agile methodology can’t fail.
- Regular feedback is taken from the customer during the production process and at every stage of the sprint. This helps the PM to know what customers are looking for. But such type of customer involvement is not promoted in the waterfall method.
- There are fewer re-works and changes at the later stage of the product development process since issues are identified at the initial phase of the project based on agile methodology. And since the waterfall doesn’t use an iterative approach, there are maximum chances that you might have to re-work the project even after its completion.
- Frequent check-ins and regular demonstrations are standard features of the agile methodology, and this helps the PM to make changes at a much faster pace. This acts as a magic wand for smaller teams since they get faster feedback.
Waterfall methodology might have been around much longer than agile, but the current era demands a more flexible and customer-centric project management approach like agile.
So, instead of reducing your project’s success rate using waterfall methodology, switch to agile and thrive on its long list of benefits.
