How your project may fail even more faster with Agile than with Waterfall
If you have read a few of my posts like Waterfall a method that never was except by ignorance, you have no doubt I am a strong proponent of Agile rather than Waterfall. Nevertheless, if your organization (manager, purchasing department,…), your business and developpement teams and your subcontractors are not adequately prepared for Agile, your project may go down the drain even faster.
A typical scenario is this: the business people don’t know how to formalize a business requirements and may pretext they don’t have time to do so. IT Manager read 01 Informatique (a famous Enterprise IT Magazine) and learned that Agile will be the great savior: no more late and out of budget project, happy business people because they don’t need to write everything down. Except that it can become worse.
In corporate organization, business users who are stakeholders may not be end-users who will actually use the application. They may decide without consulting the operational people and they are not interested in the real usability of the software only on superficial graphical design. They may not want to commit the time necessary in Agile methodology and so in the end the developers have no real specifications.
In that case Waterfall is preferable because you have at least some documents instead of nothing from Business. Agile can only be started in corporate company when there is a strong momentum accross all teams to really be able to succeed.