Waterfall vs. Other Project Management Methods

A project management methodology is a set of principals that guide how you do your work. If you look at various methodologies, you’ll see that they all do the same thing in similar ways. They are intended to give you a plan to follow to help you get the project done.

This post is the first of four in which we will look at a few of the more popular methodologies. This post will focus on Waterfall (otherwise knows as Sequential). The other posts will look at:

• Incremental
• Iterative
• Agile

But wait! Isn’t Agile a mindset? Yes – yes it is. It is also a set of principals and tools to help you do your work. But we’ll get to that later.

Waterfall

What is waterfall project management? It’s the traditional approach to managing projects in which the project is defined, scoped, planned, built, and deployed. In a waterfall project, the work is predetermined on a set schedule with specific resources. The project team knows what to expect over the entire duration of the project.

There are certain types of projects which work well with the waterfall methodology. The first one that comes to mind is literally any construction project. Let’s look at building a house. For the most part, things have to happen in a specific order. Let’s look at a single story house with a basement:

• The foundation is poured
• The sill plate gets bolted to the foundation
• The main floor is framed in with floor joists and the subfloor is attached
• The walls are built and attached to the sill plate
• The roof joists are secured to the top of the walls
• The roof underlayment is attached to the joists
• Roofing paper is attached to the underlayment
• Roofing material is attached
• Plumbing and electrical is installed
• …and so on…

First. the steps I listed above aren’t complete, so don’t take it as a tutorial for building a house. Second, when you look at the process to build a house, you know what the final deliverable is; a move-in ready residence. It should be obvious, but you can’t start with the roof, you need to work up to that. In that way, waterfall is a great methodology for this type of project because the project can be broken down into smaller parts and scheduled with the appropriate resources (e.g. framers, concrete pourers, electricians, etc.).

The Project Management Institute (PMI) has built an entire organization out of defining how waterfall projects should work. This post and my course will not go into great detail, but you can learn more at the PMI website. For our purposes, it is sufficient for now to know that waterfall is still a valid way to manage a project. It has worked for centuries (how do you think the pyramids were built?) and will continue to be applicable in the future.

TL:DR

The waterfall methodology has been used forever to manage projects of all types and remains a valid form to use in your projects today.

Waterfall is great if you know all of the major components of the project and can build a rock solid project plan.

Home construction photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash, Pyramid photo by Photo by Faqih Abdul on Unsplash