When I was starting my career I decided to study the PMBoK - Project Management Book of Knowledge. And to this day, having read countless more business books, the PMBok is still in my belief, the most practical, and information-dense piece of literature that serves as the best foundation for not only managing projects, but also running an organization.

Using the Project Management (PM) methodologies taught in the PMBok (which these days is often pejoratively called “Waterfall” or “Traditional”), I never encountered any big problems when running software or business projects. So when new methodologies such as “Agile” or “Lean” became a more prevalent buzzword in technology startups, I payed them no mind…

Ironically, I am now the COO of one of these technology companies… And being involved in the general technology space, you encounter many people that are Agile-die-hards. These die-hards are to SCRUM , what the Knight Templars are to Christianity, they have sworn of all other methodologies, and will defend Agile… with… their…last…dying…… career.

I’ve worked with a lot of PMs, but I’ve never encountered this kind of loyalty to any other PM methodology. So I became curious, and I decided to take the PMI’s Agile Certified Practitioner course (PMI - the same organization that created the PMBok)…

50 Hours Of My Personal Time Later. Here Are Some Of My Thoughts.

I want to address the most common visual comparison between Agile and Waterfall (aka. Traditional) methodology.

The above is a diagram of how Agile and Waterfall methods are most often compared visually to each other. However, this diagram is incredibly dishonest as it makes the viewer perceive Waterfall method as the higher-risk method, which is not the case. It also creates the illusion that the Waterfall projects only involve a single iteration, which again, is incorrect.

I believe a more honest visual comparison between Agile and Waterfall should look more like this.

If you asked a 4-year-old child to look at the honest visual comparison between Agile and Waterfall, the child will tell you that Agile is simply many small Waterfalls…. And in a sense, it really is. Except that of course, there can also be multiple Waterfalls in a single project. So, in practice, in terms of the stages of managing the project, there is no effective difference between Agile and Waterfall.

So where else does Agile try to differentiate itself from Waterfall?

The name “Agile” itself should give you a hint. Agile Project Management claims to be more flexible than Traditional project management, and thus more able to adapt to changing customer needs. However, this is not the case. In Traditional project management, you plan the work and you work the plan. If you plan for more flexibility, you’ll work with more flexibly in your plan. And if you plan for a shorter customer feedback loop, your project will be more customer driven. The name “Agile” is therefore presumptuous as the “Agile PM” method is not necessarily more Agile than “Traditional PM”.

The only reason the method was called “Agile Project Management” is because calling it “quick-n-sloppy Project Management” makes for less book sales and lower course attendance.

Having said all this. Agile is useful because it can be taught much faster than Traditional project management. This is for the same reason that you can build a house much quicker, if you skip the concrete foundation and pillars… you just can’t build that big of a house… And you just can’t run that large of a project using only Agile tools.

After all, it takes time to learn how to apply all the intricacies of Traditional project management.

In the end. Project management is the application of management, information, processes, and experience to achieve the project objectives. And just as I am certain that there are plenty of Traditional project managers that could benefit from being more flexible in their practices, I am also certain that they don’t need to additionally learn the “The Agile Method” to do so…

Small and petty thinking is what leads men to believe that either Traditional or Agile is the silver-bullet approach to project management. And as much as I have criticized Agile in this writing, I am by no means saying that the Traditional project management is better than Agile. Frankly, I do not know.

My message is, that your project management game needs to be built upon a strong foundation of Traditional project management knowledge (if you want to end up running large projects). Once you have this, you can subsequently cut out or change processes from the Traditional to make your style of project managing more flexible and agile.



