Waterfall Agile: Addressing the Irony of Delivering Agile Transformation with Waterfall

This article is an excerpt from the original piece “Organization Systems Integration” (https://agile-od.com/organization-systems-integration)

Agile and digital transformation projects are abundant today. The irony is that too frequently, they are planned and delivered in essentially waterfall project management style.

Waterfall is a linear, plan-all-the-way, phased execution style of project management. It is a productive project management approach, and in fact, we owe modernity to Waterfall because of its highly scalable attribute that produces predictable and replicable results.

However, it is an approach best suited for projects of certainty, such as construction engineering and production facility projects. In contrast, Agile project management is better suited for projects of complexity with lots of unknowns that contribute to variability in outcomes.

Organization Development programs, including organizational change, Agile transformation and Digital innovation projects, clearly are the latter category. In complex and uncertain environments, human behavior is volatile and unpredictable (simply put, we become overwhelmed), and applying a linear, predictable outcome seeking way of managing people is ineffective. Decades of organizational research corroborate this point: prescribed interventions for change and transformation fail with high probability.