The Difference Between Agile and Waterfall: Explaining to a Non Techie
Originally published at www.Ben-Staples.com
Agile is the bees’ knees. But some people don’t understand.
Why is it important to be able to explain the difference between waterfall and agile to people?
At any company, many of your co workers will be on non technical teams. Stakeholders, upper management, customer service. Critical parts of the operation like marketing, operations etc. have often not yet been onboarded to an agile way of working. But when the tech part of an organization is running agile, it is important to onboard your stakeholders so that the approach your team takes isn’t misunderstood, and team velocity isn’t slowed.
Often times when a company wants to start to use agile methodologies to deliver customer value, they will transform individual parts of the organization at a time instead of trying to transform the whole organization (this in itself is quite agile). Oftentimes, while tech may already be running agile, other parts of the organization are not; making the ability to convey the importance of agile even more important.
You could also be in an organization where there is a shift to tech from a traditional industry. Caterpillar (the construction machinery company) for example has been around forever…
