Shades of grey
The question I keep pondering, "when do you use agile?". "can you use agile for Fixed price projects?" is another question that is being discussed frequently and recently in Agile Alliance. Well, read on my thoughts ...
You should use agile when you cannot define requirements to the last line, when you are not clear exactly what you want and these wants potentially change depending on what you see. It is ironical that more often than not, this is the case. Hence you should use Agile more often than not.
When the requirements are in various levels of grey, agile works very well - like a dream. The key there is that details are expected to come later but commitments are expected without the details. If you try to get the details in such a case, you are force fitting a wrong peg. It is in such situations, teams should accept the shades of grey and work towards achieving business results. Will they end up achieving exactly what they want - yes. The reason is simple - no one would have spent time to define the details and hence the wants get moulded from what they see, hence you are delivering exactly what is needed - the element of grey helps. But, Waterfall may be cheaper if you force fit and ask business to provide all requirements ahead. In such a situation (when you actually force fit the model), you may end up paying the price of not achieving the business results but possibly meeting the budget or meeting the business results and possibly not the budget!
Is it always true that you will never know the requirement upfront, not always. when you are re-engineering or doing a technology refresh and not expected to change any functionality as business is very happy or to keep the budget intact, it is very useful to use the proven waterfall as it works very well and creates a platform of contractual sign offs providing clear seperation of roles - one taking up what, one taking up how, the other just implementing the how and the final one validating the implementation - and clear documents segregates these roles. If you use agile in such a situation, you may end up getting the same result but take more effort to deliver.
Thoughts?
You should use agile when you cannot define requirements to the last line, when you are not clear exactly what you want and these wants potentially change depending on what you see. It is ironical that more often than not, this is the case. Hence you should use Agile more often than not.
When the requirements are in various levels of grey, agile works very well - like a dream. The key there is that details are expected to come later but commitments are expected without the details. If you try to get the details in such a case, you are force fitting a wrong peg. It is in such situations, teams should accept the shades of grey and work towards achieving business results. Will they end up achieving exactly what they want - yes. The reason is simple - no one would have spent time to define the details and hence the wants get moulded from what they see, hence you are delivering exactly what is needed - the element of grey helps. But, Waterfall may be cheaper if you force fit and ask business to provide all requirements ahead. In such a situation (when you actually force fit the model), you may end up paying the price of not achieving the business results but possibly meeting the budget or meeting the business results and possibly not the budget!
Is it always true that you will never know the requirement upfront, not always. when you are re-engineering or doing a technology refresh and not expected to change any functionality as business is very happy or to keep the budget intact, it is very useful to use the proven waterfall as it works very well and creates a platform of contractual sign offs providing clear seperation of roles - one taking up what, one taking up how, the other just implementing the how and the final one validating the implementation - and clear documents segregates these roles. If you use agile in such a situation, you may end up getting the same result but take more effort to deliver.
Thoughts?
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