Choose the Appropriate Methodology
Highly Effective Work Habits: Choose the Appropriate Methodology
Do you get involved with a lot of project work that takes weeks, if not months, to complete? In most situations, it is difficult to run a project smoothly without a methodology in place. As projects grow in size in terms of people, resources, and time, you need something to help with organizing the project and defining deliverables.
There are two popular methodologies out there: “waterfall” and “agile” (with many derivations of each). Waterfall has been around for a very long time and is what you typically see used on projects. It involves taking an entire project from top to bottom through the phases of “initiating”, “requirements”, “design”, “build”, “testing”, and “closure”. These phases tend to fluctuate, of course, but the general idea is that you define everything up front and take the entire project through each phase until it is complete, with clear deliverables at each step. This, of course, has its downsides. Usually, the client can’t see the finished product until the testing phase. This can cause issues if the client or implementation team didn’t interpret a requirement correctly. Also, issues found further down the line are more more difficult to react to because, worst case, it can result in going back to the design phase to rework components.
Agile is a newer methodology and designed for very dynamic teams. Typically, you’ll see IT teams utilizing this. It involves splitting up a project into iterations. Each iteration is limited to a finite amount of time. At the end of each iteration, a team will typically have created something that the client can see and test. This is also the time during which the current iteration is reviewed and the next iteration is planned. These iterations typically involve daily stand-up meetings with the team and key stakeholders. They are usually no more than 15 minutes and are just for the purpose of getting status updates and reporting any roadblocks or issues. In addition, this process also helps with estimating. Functionality is broken up into epics, themes, and stories. At the story level, points are assigned based upon level of difficulty (Planning Poker). Over time, teams can accurately determine an overall project time frame based upon story points alone (i.e. story point = 2 hours). Agile also helps with scope creep. Each project will typically have a backlog of features/tasks, a subset of which is worked on in each iteration. If some new functionality is desired, it can be added to the backlog and you can immediately see the effect it has on the overall project (something slides in, something else slides out).
So, based upon what you are working on, your project will usually fall into one of these two methodologies. Determine which one best suits your team and start working against it. If you’ve never worked like this before, take baby steps. Companies/teams who just try and throw the full breadth of these methodologies at a project will usually fail. You need to do some planning and approach it in a systematic way.
