The Best of Both Worlds: Our Hybrid Agile Waterfall Approach

It doesn’t have to be binary.

There are many fans of Waterfall project management, and rightfully so.

Waterfall’s linear approach with extensive stakeholder engagement and input at the start of a project helps identify requirements and pain points so a sequential plan can be mapped out and executed.

Waterfall is a tried-and-true way to do business, and there are enormous benefits to keeping the end user in mind from the very beginning of any project.

But Waterfall misses the opportunity to be nimble and iterative, and test new ideas and solutions on the fly.

That’s why Inovi Solutions uses a hybrid approach of Agile and Waterfall on every Salesforce development and consulting project we work on.

Agile gives teams the freedom to challenge old assumptions, draw inspiration from new ideas that pop up, think critically about the requirements and pain points, and collaboratively iterate solutions with stakeholders along the way.

Drawing from the best attributes of both Agile and Waterfall usually results in more elegant solutions and better project outcomes for the client.

Our teams almost always come up with better ideas throughout the planning, development and execution stages of projects that wouldn’t have been possible if they had exclusively stuck to the rigid structure of Waterfall or the scrum-based rapid application development of Agile.

Bringing an Agile mentality to the disciplined structure and rigorous planning of Waterfall also helps reduce out-of-scope distractions or pivots in strategy that often derail projects, destroy budgets and torpedo delivery schedules.

Because there is a deeper understanding of stakeholder needs and overall business strategy from the Waterfall mindset during our discovery phase, our team can bring a faster-paced Agile approach to adapt and solve new challenges that rise up during the lifecycle of the project.

Across the many thousands of man hours that our team has spent on Salesforce development projects for businesses of all sizes, we have seen incredible results from our hybrid Agile Waterfall approach.

Projects are smoother from start to finish. Budgets and schedules are met. There isn’t as much stress. Creative juices flow. Really smart ideas happen. Solutions are sophisticated yet graceful.

Why settle for Waterfall or Agile when you can have the best of both worlds?