Part 1
Serial Lifecycles
What Lifecycle or Agile Approach Fits Your Context?
Are you trying to make an agile framework or approach work? Maybe you have technical or schedule risks. Maybe you’ve received a mandate to “go agile.” Maybe you’d like to experiment with better ways of working.
Or, maybe you’re trying to fit an agile framework into your current processes — and you’ve got a mess. You’re not getting the results you want.
I’ve seen plenty of problems when people try to adopt agile wholesale.
Instead of going agile, we’ll look at options for lifecycles and agile approaches. We’ll start the series by exploring types of lifecycles. We’ll end the series by looking at what you can do if your managers love predicting instead of using feedback loops.
Let’s first talk about how a stage-gate approach was as agile as we could get in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Yes. A serial lifecycle, a stage-gate, was as agile as we could be back then.
Stage-Gate/Waterfall Was Supposed to Help Us Cancel Projects
Every organization I know has an appetite for more work than they have teams to do the work. That’s why we have projects — to work on this product for now, until we’ve delivered…
