Agile project management is increasingly preferred over Waterfall today. However, agile project management is advisable for the small teams and startups with less number of people involved in projects. http://blog.orangescrum.com/

1. Why Agile Project Management Is Better Than Waterfall?
Agile or Waterfall Project Management?
A million dollar question for organizations to deal with. On one hand, there are huge teams, multi-year
projects involving multiple business units & the other is scalability, adaptability, faster go to markets &
quick value realization.
One Size fits all has always been a dream that never comes true. What is important is to take a more
relative approach considering an organization’s or the project’s ecosystem.
With a well-oiled organization structure in place, one can run projects in small agile teams tied to the
larger goal of the project initiative. But then a lot depends on the legacy processes and the culture of the
company when it comes to being agile.
Let’s save that discussion for another day and take a quick look at what works best between the two,
which to choose and when.

2. Why Agile project management is trending?
“According to a recent online survey of 601 IT and development professionals, it is proved that Agile is
the new typical formula for project success. The majority of projects and development teams are now
adopting this methodology.”
Further research indicated Agile was first introduced about 15 years ago as a substitute for traditional
software development approaches. Many people considered it as challenging to implement traditional
practices and agile adopters stated that this new style of software development improves team
collaboration and is more customer-centric.
Though agile methodology was present more than a decade ago, the vast majority of organizations
adopted the practice in the last 5 years. Moreover, a survey reported that agile adoption saw a sudden
rise in between the year 2009-2010.
Agile adoption has shown an incremental growth till 2008 and then its growth was accelerated after
gaining traction in the market.
If you are running a complex project, it is advisable to use agile project management as the
methodology. Complex projects contain several interconnected stages, where a change in one stage can
affect another. So, project managers use agile methodology in such a scenario, as there is a chance of
high adaptability.
Key Benefits of Agile project management:
 Improves collaboration among teams- 54%
 Enhances the quality level of software in organizations- 52%
 Results in enhanced customer satisfaction- 49%
 Speeds time to market- 43%
 Reduces development cost- 42%
Why Agile is better than Waterfall?
Another interesting fact to note is, with the increase of Agile project management, the usage of the
conventional Waterfall methodology saw a steady decline.

3. The Waterfall Model is more about a process, where one can see progress “flowing” through different
phases. It's a sequential model which goes from requirement analysis, design, implementation, testing,
and production to maintenance. When Agile is the base of development, it tends to deliver visibility,
adaptability, accountability, and value at the beginning of the process and minimizes the risks during
the project.
If you are a part of the software development industry, I am sure you know how project plans change
every day according to the customer needs! Waterfall method, being sequential in its approach cannot
adapt to the frequent change of project scope. On the other hand, agile project management employs
an iterative approach and is highly adaptable to frequent changes.
Advantages of Agile over Waterfall are:
 Agile techniques virtually eliminate the chances of absolute project failure. Agile means always
having a working product which is being built incrementally right from the very first sprint, so
that projects do not fail completely.
 The customer has frequent and early opportunities to assess the work being delivered and make
decisions & changes throughout the development lifecycle. Waterfall doesn’t involve customers
in the projects.
 Agile project management results in far less re-work on projects as issues and changes are
identified in the early stages itself. Since, Waterfall doesn’t have an iterative approach; there is a
high possibility of re-work after delivery or completion of a major feature or milestone.
 Agile involves frequent check-ins and demonstrations with the stakeholders which allows for
changes to be made at a much faster pace, which is good news for smaller teams--letting them
get feedback faster and making it easier for them to adjust to the wants and needs of the
customer. As mentioned earlier, Waterfall doesn’t encourage the involvement of Customer. So
there is less possibility of getting feedback from customers and the team. Thus, Waterfall is less
likely to be customer-centric.
 If the time to market for a specific application is a greater concern than releasing a full feature
set at initial launch, Agile can more quickly produce a basic version of working software which
can be built upon in successive iterations.

4.  In the Agile development, testing is done at the sprint level to ensure that the project is
delivered in an optimum state. It enables the project managers to perform changes if needed
and the team is aware of potential issues beforehand. In Waterfall, there is no chance of
iterative testing which makes projects prone to failure.
 The advantage of Agile methodology is that when companies take time on the front end during
planning a project using Agile techniques, they can predict the cost of a project to conclude
whether or not they should continue with the project. There is also a possibility of high ROI in
Agile than Waterfall project management.
 Because of Agile’s iterative and customer-first approach, surveys show, 49% of the Agile
projects are successful. However, this percentage is restricted to 14% in Waterfall.
 In waterfall, value delivery comes at the end of the development process. If the project exceeds
the agreed budget – which is very likely in the case of IT contracts, there may be no time and
money left to deliver the value that was agreed upon with the client. This makes Waterfall
project management highly vulnerable to budget changes. While Agile project management is
more flexible and allows for timely course correction.
 If a careful approach is not taken while evaluating budget, timelines, and resources, then
projects with Waterfall methodology may fail to deliver quality projects on time. Since agile
project management is flexible to changes, we can take quick decision for plan changes to
ensure on-time delivery. In fact, a survey shows 55% of the agile projects are delivered on-time.
Conclusion:
Agile project management is increasingly preferred over Waterfall today. However, agile project
management is advisable for the small teams and startups with less number of people involved in
projects. Since, Customer satisfaction is of highest priority for any business, agile project management is
highly recommended. Research also indicates 57% of the agile projects have generated higher customer
satisfaction.
But when a project is less prone to budget and frequent plan changes, involves large project teams, and
customer intervention is not needed or minimal, Waterfall methodology is the best option to adopt.
And what makes things interesting is that Orangescrum supports both Agile and Waterfall project
management.

5. Orangescrum offers features specific to Scrum Project Management such as Epics, Stories, Sprints (tasks
& subtasks), Scrum Boards, Sprint reports & Velocity chart along with Kanban Boards, Gantt charts, time
log, timesheets and resource management for the traditional project management.
Signup now to experience the best of both project management worlds!