Please come in Mr, er, Organization. What seems to be the trouble?
Thank you, Dr - you can call me Learnik. I'm very worried about my projects. I saw an advert for this new agile thing on the TV after the Fat Vaporizer and before Chopper's Pay Day Loans - can you give me some of that please?
Now, now, lets not leap to conclusions. We need to do a thorough examination first. Please take off your trousers and lie on the examination table.
I've been hanging around with consultants recently. They keep on asking me to do the trouser thing and it's making me nervous.
Oh, very well, we can take things a little more gently. Now is this the first project?
Yes. Phase 3 of a network infrastructure upgrade. Should I agile this?
OK. So it looks like you've done this numerous times before. You have experienced staff and vendors. You know the existing infrastructure well. Look, er, Learnik, this one looks like it will be fine if you just stand under a waterfall. It's more important that you have solid project management practices in place and someone that can run them. Agile may even cause some confusion.
Oh, right. How about this new web-based customer application?
Hmmm. Let me see the requirements. Oh dear God. "Exactly what the old application did. Some things I read about on LinkedIn. Must be easy to use". Excuse, I think I may be sick. No, it's OK. Let me give its architecture a quick tap.
Ouch!
Excellent - that's all springy, jiggly and loosely connected. Nice APIs! Well, this is a perfect candidate for doing agile. The customers have no idea what they want and won't until you put something in front of them. Now about this third one...
Yes, the legacy application upgrade.
OK, another quick tap to this architecture. Oh dear, that didn't really move at all did it? When did you last have it upgraded?
Oooh, two thousand and... four, maybe? But everyone involved with that project has left. In fact, that project was why they left. Is it supposed to be throbbing like that?
I think those are the patches that haven't stuck. How do you feel about amputation?
It's a core business system! I can't just lop it off and start again!
Learnik, this is a tricky one. You could go agile for this but the monolithic architecture means that the testing cycles will kill you. There is no good way to do this project, only less bad ways. You're probably going to have to do this waterfall but you should look at throwing a microservices wrapper around this and documenting all the integrations so you can replace it chunk by diseased chunk. And you will need to do that in an agile manner.
Thanks doc! By the way, is it true that you sell blockchains under the counter?
Get out.