Manage Your Project Portfolio

When You Need to Fix Cost

Well-meaning people have used waterfall life cycles as a way to control costs. They thought that if they monitored the documents throughout the life cycle, the documents would have some relationship to the product. We know that to be untrue. But serial life cycles persisted, and many managers derive (undeserved) comfort from them.

One of the big problems in a waterfall project is that you can’t make the decision to kill or change the project until very late in the project’s life cycle. So, when you need to fix cost, you want a life cycle that allows you as much flexibility making cost decisions as possible. That means agile.

If you need to work on a fixed-price contract, have the customer rank the requirements, ...