Johanna Rothman has an interesting post on why senior managers seem to like waterfall project management, or, as she puts it, serial lifecycles.
I do take issue with one blanket statement, however: “The projects your senior managers worked on were much simpler than the products you’re working on now.” This statement assumes either that the IT and project worlds have gotten more complex in the past 20 years or that senior managers tend to be political hacks who are promoted because they play games rather than because they were smart. The former is untrue, and the latter is untrue often enough to fail as a generalization — though I’m sure we can all point to managers for whom it is true.
But she later hits on a very telling point, I think:
Possibly the most seductive reason of all: Serial lifecycles provide a (false) prediction. And, boy oh boy, is that prediction comforting to your senior managers. “When will the project be done?” might be their most-asked question. [italics in original]
Serial lifecycles have a few aspects — perceived benefits — that I believe drive their appeal:
- As Rothman notes, they provide the appearance of prediction and control.
- She also notes that they can succeed on short projects… though pretty much anything can succeed given a short enough or simple enough project.
- They provide the easy metrics and even red-yellow-green dashboard reporting that less effective execs love.
- They provide ways for bad managers to blame others for problems and offer “support” for that blamestorming.
- They work in some industries, especially construction and manufacturing, where the percentage of unknowns and unknowables on a project, along with the variances in estimates, are very small.
- They’re the easiest methodology against which to apply project management science. Unfortunately, it’s extremely easy to misapply the science to them.
