Agile Practices With Waterfall Management
What about Program and Development Management that are using a waterfall approach with agile development team? By waterfall approach for management I’m talking about management decision not to start the development before requirements are defined, planification and release date setup. It’s not unusual to see also a stabilization phase defined as for example the last couple of iteration.
This is mainly due to:
- Product Management team is not ready at all for the first iteration,
- Infrastructure changes not identified before the first iteration,
- Product Management wants to have a full plan on the future release before starting, to prepare pre-announcement.
The final result of this approach is that the development team is not working at all…because it’s simply forbidden. The market driven approach has been well understood by Product Management and they are blocking any kind of development before they have decided what features have to be implemented.
Joaquim Rendeiro talk about co-existence of waterfall (especially for management) and agile methodology in his post on Agile or Waterfall?. Yes, they can exist but may have the consequences I’ve talked about.
IMHO, this occurs inside teams that are transitioning to agility and are not mature enough on this agile approach. As agility provide a huge responsibility and control capability to the product management, they used this extra-strength keeping in mind the waterfall approach targeting dates and content of the releases.
The development management should be the driver to accelerate the transition to a real agile approach. For example by rejecting all big kick-off meetings to start a release, and encourage a better preparation of each iteration. The development team managers should also avoid any technical discussion include an product owner and take the responsibility to make the technical choices. Often, the technical choices are delegated to product owner. Yes this is strange, but haven’t you any discussion with a product owner like: we can implement the story this way and it will cost 13 points or a different way and it will cost 21 points but this last one is less good for reasons A and B. Let guess the answer…do the shortest path. Even if this is usually the good answer from a technical perspective (I’m supporting the principle of simple design which is often shorter to implement), there is not reason to delegate this decision to product owner.
Agile approach requires a clear definition and separation of responsibility for every shareholder.