Agilish

Combining Agile and Waterfall methodologies into a cohesive approach, we call "Agilish" can be an effective way to deal with individuals and organizatons that struggle with the natural fuzziness of the Agile approach. Agilish offers the flexibility of Agile while accommodating the structured planning of Waterfall. This hybrid approach can help ensure that projects are adaptable while still meeting deadlines effectively. Here are a few tips to successfully implement Agilish: Start with a Clear Vision : Define the end goal and major milestones upfront, much like in Waterfall. This provides a roadmap that guides the Agile sprints. Iterative Planning : Use Agile sprints for iterative development and planning. Regularly review and adjust plans based on progress and feedback. Strong Communication : Maintain open lines of communication between Agile teams and Waterfall stakeholders to ensure alignment and manage expectations. Flexible Prioritization : Allow for dynamic prioritizatio...

If you want to understand what it means to truly know your user, look no further than the Blizzard of 1979 and the political career of Jane Byrne — Chicago's first and only female mayor. I was not living in Chicago when Jane was mayor, but I have heard the Blizzard of '79 story more times than I can count from people who were. It is one of those pieces of Chicago lore that never gets old. What Actually Happened In January of 1979, Chicago was buried under record snowfall — nearly 90 inches for the entire season, the most ever recorded. The city was not prepared. Mayor Michael Bilandic's administration bungled the response badly. Plows were slow to deploy. The CTA — already overwhelmed — began bypassing stops in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South and West sides in an attempt to speed up service downtown. Buses that normally took 30 minutes were taking hours. Residential streets sat unplowed for days. Garbage piled up. Schools closed. The city that famous...

We do not live in a perfect world. Most of our industry has spent the better part of two decades moving toward Agile adoption, and the case for it has never been stronger. But there are still plenty of clients, managers, and organizations that are comfortable with Waterfall — and either will not or cannot change. You can make your case. You can share the evidence. And sometimes, at the end of the day, you are still doing Waterfall. This Dilbert sums up the challenge better than I can: Pick Your Battles Dale Carnegie famously argued that you cannot win an argument . Even when you are right. Even when you have the data. The moment someone feels they are being argued into a corner, they dig in — and you have lost them, regardless of the facts. The same principle applies to how we work and the methods we use. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is let the client or the manager be right. Not because they are, but because the relationship and the work matter more than winning...

In the middle of the 19th century, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have saved thousands of lives. Instead, it cost him his career, his reputation, and ultimately his life. His story is one of the most important cautionary tales in the history of science — and one of the most relevant to anyone who has ever tried to challenge the status quo inside a large organization. The Discovery Semmelweis was working in a Vienna maternity ward in the 1840s when he noticed something deeply troubling. Women giving birth in the ward staffed by doctors and medical students were dying at a dramatically higher rate than women in the ward staffed by midwives. The difference was stark. The data was undeniable. He set out to understand why. What he found was that the doctors were moving directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies — without washing their hands. He hypothesized that something was being transferred from the cadavers to the patien...

Bringing Agile into a corporate IT environment that has not asked for it is one of the hardest things you can do in this industry. Large, well-established IT organizations have often spent years — sometimes decades — building their processes, standards, and ways of working. That history does not disappear because someone in leadership decided it was time to go Agile. And if you treat it as though it should, you are going to have a fight on your hands. Here is the thing though. In my experience, once teams actually make the switch, most of them like it. They see the benefits quickly. They get more visibility into their own work. They feel less like cogs in a machine and more like people with real ownership over what they are building. Most will never go back. The resistance is rarely about Agile itself — it is about change. About uncertainty. About being asked to operate differently in an environment that has not changed around them. That distinction matters, because it changes how...

A friend recently shared a fascinating article about a mistake made by some of the greatest scientific minds of the 19th century. For decades, the best mathematicians and astronomers in the world were convinced there was an undiscovered planet — named Vulcan — orbiting between Mercury and the Sun, hidden from view. The math seemed to demand it. The calculations were elegant. The theory was accepted as fact. There was no planet. A Star-Crossed 'Scientific Fact': The Story of Vulcan, Planet That Never Was Two lines from the article stuck with me. The first: "It's easy to forget that there are people behind the data and equations. And when people are involved, there is always room for human error." The second hit even harder: "In science, you don't dwell on the blind alleys... but the blind alleys are most of what science actually does. You have to go down the blind alley, you bang your head against that blank wall at the end of it, come b...

There is a Russian proverb that translates to: "The first pancake is always spoiled." At first glance it sounds pessimistic. But I find it far more hopeful — and far more Agile-minded — than the phrase you hear so often in IT: "It is what it is." The first pancake proverb carries an honest and important message: the first attempt at anything is rarely perfect. That is expected. It is not a failure — it is the price of admission. Learning happens through doing, and the first version of something exists precisely to teach us what the second version should be. Think about what actually happens when you make pancakes. The first one almost always goes wrong. The pan is not quite at the right temperature. There is too much butter, or not enough. The batter spreads differently than you expected. You cannot know any of these things until you put the butter in the pan and pour the batter down. Only then do you start to understand. The first pancake might be uneve...