Old Ways of Working (OWOW) Vs New Ways of Working (NWOW)

I have worked in the ICT industry for 22 years now and have seen many different operating models/Ways of Working but most of them can me traced back to three main types and they are:

• Waterfall
• Wagile
• Agile

My thoughts on the above ways of working are as follows.

Waterfall: This is what most companies start off with when they are a start-up company/organisation because start-ups generally mimic the larger, more successful companies. But not only that, the processes and procedures are easy to follow and we, as people, logically think this way as we have been taught that if we start something, we have to complete it before delivering it to customers/consumers/clients. Supposedly any idiot can follow waterfall processes and procedures.

Wagile: This is where most companies end up as they started at the beginning of time with Waterfall processes and procedures that are ingrained into the company and the way they operate. But then, because the clients want value delivered sooner, they start migrating the lower levels of the company, for example, projects to Agile so that the product or service is delivered to suit what the client expects to keep them happy.

Because of this approach to change the operations at project level without proper change management to a more collaborative, transparent, and flexible value driven way of working they use agile coaches that are only trained and experienced in implement processes and procedures and not in managing and coaching the team members through the change. This is where friction, uncertainty and fear arise within those teams as the team members feel like they are being forced to operate completely differently from what they are used to. If the people side of the change is not addressed early on the transition to Agile, the companies end up alienating their project team members and some employees will leave the organization as they feel as though they are not being, see and heard and therefore don’t matter.

Because the ways of working are being changed at the project level, there are still waterfall processes and procedures (funding, reporting etc..) being used throughout the rest of the organization, which causes extra work for the team. So, these organizations are then known as Wagile.

Some organizations will try to join the two ways of working together by taking the best parts of waterfall and Agile and joining them together to for a Wagile way of working. With this, they do not realize that the Agile DSDM methodology is modifiable but Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFE, Lean frameworks have far less flexibility with what you can take out of them. As Scrum and Kanban are lightweight, they should not be mixed with waterfall or have parts removed from them. They become complex and hard to work with when those that do not understand that they are lightweight come along and try to add or remove processes, procedures artifacts from them to make them fit into the project or organization.

If you are going to go down the Agile path and the company/organization started as a start-up with waterfall then you need to be doing the transformation from the top down, so the new processes and procedures are adhered to and trickle down to the lower levels and all upper level management are behind and support the change fully and yes this will also need a change manager and not only agile coaches but coaches that are trained in mindset coaching to work with all levels of staff to ensure that the shift in mindset for all employees happens with minimal friction and resistance. This will ensure that the employees feel seen, heard, and valued. This also involves putting all employees thought training for the new ways of working so that they understand what is going on around them in the workplace, including roles and responsibilities so that everyone understands how they are to function, what their responsibilities are and the role that they play in the NWOW. You should not just drop the NWOW processes and procedures on your employees without bringing them along on the journey with adequate training, change management and people coaching.

Agile:  This is where the company started up at as a start-up with fully Agile processes and procedures and continues to use that operating model without modifying it. This is the only true form of agile and I like to call it Vanilla Agile because all the processes and procedures at the top level have and will always be built on Agile, including the funding and reporting structures. Vanilla Agile companies/organizations are rare, as I have never worked in a vanilla Agile company in all my 22 years in the ICT industry. I would love to work in one, though.

I know the differences between each way of working as I have qualifications in Agile and Waterfall have worked in Waterfall and Wagile environments over my 22 years in the ICT industry.

I worked with someone a few years back who while the company we were working for didn’t have a clue about Scrum and during the transformation of a multi-million-dollar project emailed management saying that she did not think Scrum would work for software development work. I had to laugh at that because if she had done the Scrum training, she would have known that Scrum was formed years back for software development. This person was put in the Project Manager’s role of the project without having had any prior Project management experience and no qualification in either Agile or Waterfall. I tried to coach and educate her on scrum (scrum Master vs Project manager roles and responsibilities) with little to no success. In the end, she was moved into another role that she was far better suited to.

To this day, there are still people in the industry who don’t know the differences between the roles and responsibilities of an Agile Project Manager and a Scrum Master and so the Project managers try to push all their work onto the Scrum Masters to get done. These roles are very different roles.©

Copyright © 2022 Lynette Diehm.

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