Pros And Cons Of Agile And Waterfall Project Management

The paper is divided into three sections, the first of which will establish a timeline of events. This project background will serve as a case study for the analysis in the following section that will be structured such that each of the previously mentioned facets will be independently analyzed and contrasted with project management principles. Finally the paper will conclude with a summary of the analysis and recommendations based on

With the exceptional growth in technology, the present day projects are often large and complex involving a significant risk. So, a Project Management Methodology enables the delivery organization to handle these projects comprehensively, systematically and in an integrated manner, which results in strategic, tactical and operational benefits.

Risk or threat is common and found in various fields of daily life and business. This concept of risk is found in various stages of development and execution of a project. Risks in a project can mean there is a chance that the project will result in total failure, increase of project costs, and an extension in project duration which means a great deal of setbacks for the company. The process of risk management is composed of identifying, assessing, mitigating, and managing the risks of the project. It

Agile Project management is one of the industries dominating methodology for project management in IT. It is an incremental and iterative way to manage the build and design activities for constructing an IT product, services, and project development in manner which is highly interactive and flexible. In this methodology, scope is defined in granularity that is appropriate with time horizon and checked with the agreement on each feature with the customer. In this methodology work steps are divided with feature breakdown structures. In order to track the progress of the project progress charts are used instead of Gantt charts. Cross-functional and test-driven development teams starts working from the very beginning of the project to provide

Design activities are closely interrelated and generally all done with substantial overlap. “During design, it is often necessary to verify the correctness or workability of the proposed design. One important verification method is to build working prototypes of parts of the system to ensure that it will function correctly in the operating environment.” Every system must have sufficient controls to protect the integrity of the database and the application program. These controls should be integrated into the new system while it is being designed, not after it has been constructed (Chapter 2, 2004).

PRINCE2® (Projects in Controlled Environments), is a widely used project management methodology that navigates you through all the essentials for running a successful project. It provides project managers with a practical roadmap from conception to close.

Project Management Office (PMO) and Agile method are highly reputable terms in many organizations, especially in their IT projects. The PMO is a group of people or committee within an organization that is responsible to define and maintain standards and practices for traditional project management. The ultimate objective for the PMO is to gain the benefits that are derived from applying Project Management (PM) methods, practices and policies. Thus, the PMO over time will become the origin for documentation, guidance and metrics regarding to any practices that are involved in managing projects within the organization, as well as it will be the communication channel that

In order to perform project risk management effectively, the organization or the department must know the meaning of the risk clearly. With regards to a project, the management must focus on the potential effects on the objectives of the project, for example, cost and time (Loosemore, Raftery and Reilly, 2006). Risk is a vulnerability that really matters; it can influence the objectives of the project

Application requirements are provided by stakeholders and users for all development efforts. This is true for both agile and waterfall development projects. The difference is the amount of requirements that are provided. In the waterfall approach, all requirements are provided at the beginning of the project (Israr Ur Rehman, 2010, p. 2). Specifically, for a new application, the expectation is that stakeholders are able to provide all the requirements for the new application. Stakeholders, project managers, business analysts, users of the application meet to identify and document the requirements. Detailed application documentation is created, reviewed and signed off by the appropriate stakeholder (Ove Armbrust, 2011, p. 239). Following the agile methodology, requirements are defined for the phase to be delivered. The goal is to break up the application into iterations and define the requirements for the iterations or stories (Ove Armbrust, 2011, p. 239). In the agile implementations, the requests are stored in a backlog. This is the list stories remaining to be developed. Requirements documentation generated from a waterfall project is extensive; in contrast to agile where the documentation is limited to the story or stories to be developed (Ove Armbrust, 2011, p. 239). In my experience, the requirements documentation has been stored in a central repository to be referenced during the project.

Several adaptations to the traditional approaches like agile, interactive, phased, extreme, etc have been made but each will be expected to meet the requirements of the project objectives, timeline, resources, and deliveries of the stakeholders. Other industry standard certifications like ISO9000 and regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley have also influenced methodologies and processes used by several organisations (Kerzner, 2003). Generally, managing projects should involved five major process which include the project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and then project closing. See Fig. 2 below.

and new demands from users (Uikey & Suman, 2012). The SDLC focuses on the prime

Indeed, in an unstable environment, Traditional Project Management can lead to failure if changes are too impacting and important regard to the final product. Traditional Project Management involves a waterfall methodology to manage projects. It follows a weel structured stage plan. Those plans used to be quarterly, yearly or multiple yearly. For Marketers, it is often long and heavy as a whole project is managed in one time, from the planning to the deliverable, without real flexibility and real feedback. Marketing Managers use Waterfall because of the business priorities.

The purpose of this paper is to recommend that Project Management is a concept that focuses on the dynamic characteristics of a multi-facetted organization. In such a changing situation, effective communication is a characteristic that should be stressed and becomes the most important tool for the project manager and team members.

The rigidity of the model is easy to manage - Each stage has a specific distribution and review process.

They are not tool specific. In today's software-reliant world, the reality is that the methodology and the organization's project management software tool are often heavily intertwined. Complication and sophisticated client expectations of the latest projects reveal the flaws of traditional project management methods. In addition usually project managers are expected to make a sense of balance between client expectations and business interests and also to improve the end product, decrease cost and duration of the project (Project Management Institute 2005). The disadvantages of traditional project management method are listed below.