All project management is terrible when you are following it blindly and have no understanding of what it takes to succeed.
Waterfall works when it's done right in the right environment. It's a nightmare when it's not. Agile works when it's done right in the right environment. It's a nightmare when it's not.
Having a good project manager who understands what it takes to succeed from a management/executive perspective and who understands how to keep engineers both productive and happy is priceless.
During the waterfall days, you would run into managers who would gannt everything and harass people into meeting deadlines for whatever would solve the 8 word description of the item on the chart. These days, you run into managers who are happy to distribute a jira ticket to resolve anyones gripe.
And then there are the thoughtful ones who understand priorities, factors for success, and how to set reasonable expectations on both sides of the table (for the techies and non-techies)
In the end, it's not the process you follow, it's the results that matter.
> In the end, it's not the process you follow, it's the results that matter.
I was nodding along with this post up until this last sentence.
Yes, the results are what matter, but process is what drives the results. It is thus critical to the success of a project to ensure that the process is appropriate.
For example, the entire purpose of agile is to have short iteration cycles where you deliver to customers and get feedback before starting the next cycle. If you have a product where you cannot get feedback, agile is a bad solution! You will deliver every two weeks - and then continue to do what you would have done anyway. That makes all the agile ceremonies quite the waste of time.
Conversely, if you ARE getting feedback regularly it's insane to do waterfall when you're two weeks into a 6 month project, and the customer doesn't like what you're showing them.
This can get a lot more detailed at the micro-level for managing process on teams - there are tradeoffs between developer happiness, speed, quality, visibility, and many other axes that process can adjust, and a team that is set up with good process will be set up to execute better than one that isn't.
I tend to be someone that is perceived to "hate process", but I don't, I hate bad process that is counterproductive to execution and achieving results.
Waterfall works when it's done right in the right environment. It's a nightmare when it's not. Agile works when it's done right in the right environment. It's a nightmare when it's not.
Having a good project manager who understands what it takes to succeed from a management/executive perspective and who understands how to keep engineers both productive and happy is priceless.
During the waterfall days, you would run into managers who would gannt everything and harass people into meeting deadlines for whatever would solve the 8 word description of the item on the chart. These days, you run into managers who are happy to distribute a jira ticket to resolve anyones gripe.
And then there are the thoughtful ones who understand priorities, factors for success, and how to set reasonable expectations on both sides of the table (for the techies and non-techies)
In the end, it's not the process you follow, it's the results that matter.