This Toastmaster presentation involved discussing a technical topic with a non-technical audience. Since many people find the topic of project management confusing, a comparison between the Waterfall and Agile project management workflows offers a way to approach the topic.

For years, the waterfall workflow was standard operation in many corporations. This usually meant quarterly target dates. Agile brought much faster and more frequent target dates which had a huge impact on production. For many projects, especially software related projects, the advantages are obvious.

Many businesses have found, that some types of work have limited success with an Agile workflow, such as projects involving daily scheduling or long term database monitoring tasks. A concept known as “bimodal” was coined by Gartner, Inc. to refer to the two workflow styles. Mode 1 for tasks that fair better using the traditional workflow, and mode 2 for those using the more rapid agile approach.

As a former employee of Gartner, I participated in both, and saw advantages and challenges with both. This will be discussed in an upcoming post.