Page 141 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

EASIER TO FOLLOW - Following on from the above, everyone knows just where in the life cycle of the
project they are - at every stage. This allows project managers to be more organised and to keep the
process flowing.

MILES AHEAD FOR MILESTONES - Perfect for milestone and deadline driven projects. The linear
structure of waterfall lends itself to projects and teams that are suited to ‘milestone led working’
due to the ease with which "a timeline for the whole project can be drawn and easily marked into
stages. This adds clarity to the project that makes communication and understanding across the
team fairly easy."

EARLY CHANGES - Great for projects which benefit from (or have a need for) design alterations early
on in the process. Changes can easily be accommodated early on in the lifecycle (although,
admittedly, it gets harder further on).

BETTER QUALITY OUTCOMES - Waterfall often delivers a better end product. Each stage of the
waterfall process is effectively spent debugging, you don't move on until the stage you are working
on is acceptable so if you follow that logically to the end conclusion you should finish up with a
product that is perfect.
LESS NEED FOR MICROMANAGEMENT - The 'rules' of Waterfall sort of look after a lot of your
management needs - you don't move on until you've completed each step. "It actually saves me
time managing in the project because the rules are well established and understood which allows
me time to work on the project, taking a helicopter view of the project rather than getting bogged
down in little details.”
What Waterfall's Detractors Say

CHANGES ARE DIFFICULT – Although it may accommodate early stage changes, because Waterfall is
a set of sequential steps, once you have moved on, alterations to previous elements of the project
are harder than with more agile solutions. Not impossible! We joke that one PM friend is so adept at
swimming back upstream using waterfall he must have been a salmon in a previous life. The truth is
that he has adapted Waterfall so it is almost a hybrid of Waterfall and Agile and the key is an
awareness of how a retrospective change to a previous stage will affect successive stages and
making a judgement call based upon that. Also, any changes that are made have to meticulously
documented.

TRADITIONALLY, LATE TESTING MEANS ERRORS ARE FOUND LESS QUICKLY - Some Waterfall users,
following a traditional template, say that late testing of a project means that problems are found
later and are therefore harder to put right. The workaround for this, as hinted earlier, is to test at
every stage before moving on.

LESS TRANSPARENT FOR STAKEHOLDERS - Waterfall is a bit of a closed shop! Waterfall is great for
keeping your team up to date but those using it tend not to share progress with clients and
stakeholders. One PM put it like this, "If you're building a house, when does it start to look like the
house your client is imagining? Not when you dig the foundations, not when you lay the first bricks,
it isn't until the late stages, when the roof goes on or you hang the doors and windows that it finally
becomes a house. It's the same with Waterfall IT Projects, there's no point sharing meaningful
information about your project until close to delivery, to do otherwise is like taking a builder
showing their client the holes they've dug for the foundations and asking, 'What do you think of your
house?' - waste of time."