Implementing IT solution with waterfall - my personal example

This time I would like to provide an example of one IT project and how choosing wrong project management type can make everything overcomplicated. The example which I am going to provide took place in production factory where I was responsible for logistics. The story was simple - factory had its own applications developed by its software developers long time ago for their needs. However, there were several problems - the application was written using outdated technologies and there was only one software developer left who could maintain those programs. Overall company decided they should not have their own software and switch to some standard ERP solution.

As a factory had its project managers and widely followed waterfall approach, they decided to continue using that approach on this project as well. There was no need to make a lot of development per se, as the company decided to use one of standard ERP solutions, mostly some modifications which seemed simple enough. The idea was to write specification, then make modifications in the application for the needs of production, testing, deployment and maintenance. One big step added to this model was tutoring, as there were a lot of workers depending on the program.

The chosen approach was not the best - by the time I came to a company, the whole process has already been around for five years, but was still on step one - writing a documentation. The goal was to write documentation for the whole system including marketing, supply chain, transport, accounting, budget-planning and a lot of more. So the company wanted to finish writing a documentation for everything and then start development and implementing. Within 5 years no major steps had been done - documentation was still not full and some part of it required an update. Then a proper solution was made - to take a more agile approach and divide the whole solution into smaller modules and take them one by one. Within a year new documentation was created and 2 big modules already were working - marketing and financial.

Problems with waterfall[1]

I made a conclusion to myself, that although waterfall was a good method for production, it does not suit all the situations. Sometimes more agile and flexible approach is needed. It does not mean waterfall is a bad management strategy in IT as well, it just means that it suits not every project out there.

1. https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/agile-vs-waterfall/

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