No single methodology is right for everyone, but lean principles tend to be a better fit for most. And that's really what Agile and Scrum are.
The most important thing for teams is to establish a rapid feedback loop, and make sure someone is tasked with handling that data. Once you know your customers' needs, you can act to resolve them. If you're using a waterfall approach, you can miss the window, which delays your ability to get changes in front of customers, which delays feedback and increases the chance that you're wasting time.
Before we adopted an Agile-inspired process, we had several projects get scrapped after weeks or months of work because we misunderstood the customer's problem. When we adopted a new process, we built smaller MVPs (took days instead of weeks) and got customer feedback that indicated we needed to make a shift. Many of our features got smaller because we didn't get time to over-engineer them.
The major flaw, IMO, is technical debt. Our product is released on a schedule, but we get feedback from users with alpha products, so we have time to clean up the implementation once we get hands-on feedback from customers.
If we adopted Agile 100%, we likely would rack up more technical debt, and I've actually seen this happen in that same company as management made changes (I became trainer and technical lead instead of project manager).
If you drink too much of the kool aid, you'll get a stomach ache.
The most important thing for teams is to establish a rapid feedback loop, and make sure someone is tasked with handling that data. Once you know your customers' needs, you can act to resolve them. If you're using a waterfall approach, you can miss the window, which delays your ability to get changes in front of customers, which delays feedback and increases the chance that you're wasting time.
Before we adopted an Agile-inspired process, we had several projects get scrapped after weeks or months of work because we misunderstood the customer's problem. When we adopted a new process, we built smaller MVPs (took days instead of weeks) and got customer feedback that indicated we needed to make a shift. Many of our features got smaller because we didn't get time to over-engineer them.
The major flaw, IMO, is technical debt. Our product is released on a schedule, but we get feedback from users with alpha products, so we have time to clean up the implementation once we get hands-on feedback from customers.
If we adopted Agile 100%, we likely would rack up more technical debt, and I've actually seen this happen in that same company as management made changes (I became trainer and technical lead instead of project manager).
If you drink too much of the kool aid, you'll get a stomach ache.