This week’s materials cover some aspects of managing large scale projects. There was a comparison of the (considered somewhat outdated) waterfall approach and the Agile approach.
I spent the last 17 years as an independent Excel/VBA Development Consultant, and my approach to each project was very much in line with the waterfall approach, as the video demonstrated. I can see many advantages to be gained from taking an Agile approach instead, but within a consulting context, I suspect that it would be very much dependant upon the culture of the client organisation as to whether they would be willing to accommodate that. In my experience, clients want to hold the consultant to a clearly defined set of objectives and a predetermined budget, and I’m fairly certain that the clients that I have worked with would never have achieved sign-off for a business case that didn’t explicitly dictate these things. That said, it was very often the case that once the client began to learn of the potential for additional functionality for the model or system that I was building, they would then set to battle for sign-off on an amended and extended business case. This process often makes for a less than efficient development process, but at the end of the day, the client gets what the client wants.
Having done a significant amount of self-directed investigation into the mechanics of an Agile approach in week 4, I won’t go back over the ins-and-outs of an Agile process with this post. However, as I’ve said previously, Agile was not something that I had come up against prior to this course, and while I’m confident that I understand the theoretical process, I’m keen to become a part of an Agile run project as I don’t believe that you can fully appreciate the practicalities of such a situation until you have been a part of it in operation. I’m sure that I’ll have plenty of questions when the time comes.
My Journey to App Success 