Agile paradigm shift

- When you're moving to Agile, frankly, your whole world will flip on its head. So, what does that mean? Well, first, the triple constraints you're already familiar with are going to change. The constraints, time, costs and scope, are visualized as a triangle with one element at each corner. In traditional project management, Waterfall, the definition of success is to keep all three constraints unchanged throughout the lifecycle. So, the top of the triangle is scope. At the bottom of the triangle are time and cost. All three are fixed and aren't supposed to change. In reality, change needs to happen on any project. So how is this handled? Well, by using long processes, documenting the changes, and flexing all three constraints because as scope grows, so do cost and schedule. Agile turns the triangle upside down, literally. This is a huge paradigm shift. Agile says that we'll fix the time and cost of effort and leave scope flexible. Think about that for a second. It sounds like chaos will ensue, but it doesn't. A lot of people ask me, "How does a business build a business case "and get funding for flexible scope?" It seems like an unsolvable riddle, so let's explore this a little more. A business knows its budget for projects in any given year. It also knows when it would like to hit the goals it set for its department. So, it already knows its budget, timeline, and goals. In Waterfall, scope is a list that's all encompassing about how to reach the goal. In Agile, scope is more closely aligned to the objective, or goals, for the business. For example, let's say you're leading a marketing team. You have $10,000 to spend with a goal of increasing traffic to your website by 25% in the fourth quarter. Do you know your exact scope? No. Can you make a business case for the effort? Yes, you can. You don't need to know all the details of exactly how. Not yet. That's where the second paradigm shift comes in. This is the shift from defined process controls to empirical process controls. Waterfall relies on defined linear processes. Requirements, then design, followed by development, testing, and deployment. This is all about upfront planning. On the other hand, Agile depends on empirical process controls, where upfront planning is done just as much as needed to get work started. From there, future plans are focused on small increments of work based on observation and experimentation. It's very much about defining how as you learn the way things work in the real world. More like testing a scientific hypothesis than like building a house. These shifts are huge, but once you understand them you'll succeed when you try them.