The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 4Agile and Waterfall: Choose a Development Process

INTRODUCTION

“I love my phone!” “This report is useless!” “It's so easy to pay my bills online.” “What a hassle to take time off my job to go the clinic—the hours are so inconvenient.” “The building is beautiful!”

These are stakeholders talking. To be specific, these are customers and end users. Here's another stakeholder's point of view. “There will never be enough traffic to generate the revenue we need.”

After all the effort that goes into a project, have we actually produced something that is desirable? Do the benefits of the outcome outweigh the cost of the development? Did we realize the expected value?

As we create products and services, hitting the value target is always a challenge. The project team needs to figure out exactly what should be built, and then build it correctly. That is true whether we are working on a residential remodel, bringing a new drug to market, or expanding online banking services. We call this journey from requirements discovery through construction and turnover a product development life cycle or product development process.

A product development process describes the major phases of work and how the work should be performed. Since remodeling a kitchen has little in common with bringing a new drug to market, it is no surprise that the product development life cycle for these two kinds of projects is very different.

Unlike project management, which is practiced essentially the same ...