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Discussion on: Explain waterfall project management, why did it fall out of style?

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zedgoat

I think it depends on what bubble you're in. Our org uses agile at a certain level towards the operational / technical side of things but at the mid to higher levels waterfall style planning is very much still a thing.

If you're a small startup with a lot of room for error and a decent cash runway, agile is fine, because there's many tolerances to play with there. If you're putting together a multi-billion dollar industrial installation and all of the associated systems (ie, systems engineering proper), at some point very large chunks of work with sometimes 5-10 year leads times need to be co-ordinated using processes that provide stable and predictable interfaces fairly early on.

Even if you completely ignored "waterfall" vs "agile" as methodologies you'd wind up with something very waterfall like when trying to bring together internal resources, EPCM's and the likes over larger timeframes / multi-million dollar budgets with the associated risk at that scale.

Note, this isn't a bash on agile (I use it for most of my recent projects and teams, and think it produces better outcomes), but it doesn't scale up past a certain level of cost and complexity.