Organizations that are attempting to transition to Agile demonstrate waterfall characteristics – residually or resurgently. Understanding these characteristics and learning to observe the manifestation of these tendencies in organization systems will help you uncover impediments to your organization’s Agile metamorphosis.
After reading this series of articles, you may realize that your organization is still being waterfall but thinks otherwise i.e., Wagile.
In this article series, I want to explore deeper into the “waterfall” label and lay bare the fundamental characteristics that makeup such a system. Subsequently, I will dive deeper into each characteristic to highlight expected systemic behaviors and unintended consequences that frankly should no longer be unexpected.
Any software development shop that practices Waterfall will demonstrate these three fundamental characteristics:
Phased and Gated Approach
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” – Yogi Bera
Phases are strictly linear sequences of activities to build a product or deliver a project. These activities are divided along process lines. Funding and progression to the next sequential phase is gated to ensure the quality of deliverables handed off between silos. Many decisions are concentrated on gating decision points. The Phase-gate approach provides an illusion of control, delaying feedback on products.
In theory, it is expected that an idea is sound and that it can be analyzed and designed. The developers and testers have to just engineer this into a system that will be launched under warm summer sun. In practice (reality) people are not sure whether their idea will be the “winner” that they want it to be, analysts and architects are puzzled and pull together a plausible solution. Developers and testers soon realize that a plausible solution is not really possible. So they work late nights to jimmy in one fix after another until the project gets launched too late and for too much. Phased and gated approaches are guaranteed innovation killers.
Large Batch Hand-Offs
Champions of a holistic perspective want a detailed understanding of the project. Such understanding drives planning, enables optimization of labor resources, maximizes utilization, and reduces rework.
The paragraph above is more suited to be about a project that uses machines to punch holes in sheet metal. Not about a project that applies human knowledge and skills.
The real challenge is about controlling runaway batch sizes where, despite best intentions, organizations attempting to move towards Agile methods are unable to keep and maintain small batch sizes and, as a result, accumulate work in large batches.
Centralized Control
Complementary to Phased and Gated, where decisions are concentrated at ‘gates’, with centralized control, decision-making authority is also concentrated within selected groups.
Know-how is not know-when. While a central control body may be able to collect all information about the state of a project or portfolio, by the time they get to make sense of this information the situation on the ground has often shifted. Delays are built by default into information flows of centralized control organization systems. Only in hindsight do decision-makers know when they should have applied their know-how.
Command and control style management often manifests in organizations that have Centralized Control characteristics. In such organizations, decisions are always made by a select few. Organizational gossip is the primary means of getting real information and management lacks awareness of real problems on the ground. Project effort, “TPS reports” (bureaucratic paperwork that adds no value), and tasks make little sense to people doing the work and managers consistently feel ill-informed despite many daily, weekly, and monthly status updates. Most feel like a piece in a chess game. Some carry the illusion of more power than others, but each is equally at the mercy of the organization system complexity that plays them.
All Waterfall organizations are not the same
Waterfall as implemented in one organization is different from waterfall implemented in another organization. Think of these three characteristics as primary colors in the RGB Color Model. Organizations differ in their waterfall-ish-ness due to differences in their emphasis on one characteristic over the other.
The same RGB model analogy is applicable to individuals – reflective of their mindsets. When enough people share a similar mindset (knowingly or unknowingly), self-similar patterns get repeated over and over again. That is to say that these tendencies manifest themselves at all levels, from project funding to project release level to how organizations are structured. To draw your attention to these self-similar patterns at levels within the organization’s work system, I will use examples and highlight these under the sub-section ‘fractal nature’.
Summary
No two waterfall organizations are the same. The three characteristics: Phase & Gate, Large Batch, and Centralized Control are emphasized by each organization differently. The degree of emphasis that your organization places on one or more of these characteristics will determine the challenges that it will have to overcome in its Agile transformation. In the next series of articles, I will dive deeper into each characteristic highlighting the challenges that you should expect. Conversely, if you observe the challenges then you can get closer to understanding the legacy mindsets that are impeding your organization’s transformation.
