There’s an argument that has been running in project management for twenty years, and I’ve come to think it’s mostly a way of avoiding harder questions.
Agile or Waterfall. Iterative or sequential. Pick your tribe and defend it.
I’ve delivered with both. I’ve delivered with a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, and a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing. Here’s what I’ve noticed: the framework was never what made the difference.
I’ve seen Agile projects collapse into endless sprints that produced velocity charts and nothing that shipped. I’ve seen Waterfall projects deliver exactly what was promised, on the date they said, because someone had thought hard about sequencing and stuck to it. I’ve also seen the exact reverse of both.
What separated the successes from the failures had nothing to do with the method. It was whether someone owned the outcome, and whether they made the hard calls when the framework didn’t have an answer for them.
The framework never has an answer for the hard part. That’s the point. Methods are scaffolding, and scaffolding is genuinely useful, but the building still gets put up by people.
The tribal element of this argument is what makes it so unproductive. Once you’ve declared yourself Agile, questioning any part of it starts to feel like heresy. The method stops being a tool and becomes an identity, and identities are defended rather than examined. It’s best practice in another costume.
That’s when the real cost appears. Teams spend energy arguing about ceremonies, or defending stage gates, that should be going into the actual work. The argument feels like rigour. It’s mostly displacement.
Stop asking “Agile or Waterfall?” It’s the wrong question and it eats hours that belong to delivery.
Ask what this project actually needs. A piece of infrastructure with fixed safety requirements and a regulatory sign-off wants a plan, and wants it thought through in advance. A product still discovering who its users are wants room to change direction without a change control board convening. Most real projects want some of each, in different places, at different times.
The strongest project managers I know aren’t loyal to a method. They’re loyal to the outcome, and they’ll bend the approach to serve it, including using pieces of both and apologising to nobody. That’s also the instinct behind changing the plan when it stops reflecting reality.
Pick the tool that fits the work. Then get on with the work.
Ben Webb is an award-winning project leader and strategist. Named Australian Institute of Project Management Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for the International Project Management Association’s World Project Manager of the Year in 2023, he writes about delivery, leadership and the difference between managing a project and actually getting it done.
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