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Waterfall project management was a mistake

Last week I was reading the ‘Are project managers living a lie?’ blog post by Peter Saddington, when I noticed the following eye-opening paragraph:

“It has always been eye-opening to many people when I tell my workshop participants or clients that they old waterfall way of doing software was never intended to be used. It was a misinterpretation of Dr. Royce’s seminal paper. What happened was that government agencies read the first page, saw a diagram (with a poorly chosen caption), and said: “Hey, that’s how we do software development!

Yes, that’s right. Waterfall project management was never the point. It was actually iterative development that Dr. Winston Royce was pointing to… later in his paper.

If they had read the second page of Dr. Royce’s paper, they would have found the following quotes:

“I believe in this concept, but the implementation described above is risky and invites failure.”

“Yet if these phenomena fail to satisfy the various external constraints, then invariably a major redesign is required.”

“The required design changes are likely to be so disruptive that the software requirements upon which the design is based and which provides the rationale for everything are violated. Either the requirements must be modified, or a substantial change in the design is required. In effect the development process has returned to the origin and one can expect up to a 100-percent overrun in schedule and/or costs.”

It’s kind of sad that the most used Project Management technology today is based on a misinterpretation of a paper. I hope that some (project) managers will read this paper and maybe even start thinking about how they are managing their projects today… (and yes, I’m also talking about the ‘Scrum but…’ adepts!)

Waterfall Managing the Development of Large Software Systems Royce

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