If you’re managing projects in Ireland, whether in Dublin’s Silicon Docks, Cork’s pharmaceutical belt, or Galway’s MedTech hub, you’ve likely faced the question: Waterfall or Agile?
It’s not just a theoretical debate. The project management methodology you choose shapes everything from team structure to stakeholder expectations, budget flexibility to delivery timelines. And in Ireland’s increasingly complex project landscape, where multinational tech giants work alongside indigenous SMEs, the stakes for getting it right have never been higher.
This isn’t about picking the “better” methodology. It’s about understanding which approach aligns with your project’s reality, your organisation’s culture, and Ireland’s unique business environment.
The key question isn’t “which is better?” but rather “which fits my project’s specific needs?”
Waterfall methodology has been the backbone of project management since Winston Royce introduced it in 1970. Drawing inspiration from manufacturing and construction, it follows a sequential, phase-by-phase approach where each stage must be completed before the next begins.
The methodology moves through distinct phases in a predetermined order:
Requirements Gathering: Everything is defined upfront: scope, specifications, deliverables, and success criteria. Stakeholders agree on what will be built before any work begins.
Design: The technical architecture and detailed plans are created based on the requirements. This includes system design, workflows, and technical specifications.
Implementation: Development or construction begins. Teams build according to the approved designs with minimal deviation from the plan.
Testing and Verification: The completed product undergoes rigorous testing to ensure it meets the original requirements and quality standards.
Deployment: The finished product is released to users or goes live.
Maintenance: Ongoing support addresses any issues that arise post-launch, though major changes require returning to the beginning of the cycle.
Ireland’s regulated industries have long relied on Waterfall’s structured approach. In pharmaceutical manufacturing, where Ireland hosts 9 of the world’s top 10 pharma companies, projects must comply with strict GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) regulations. Any deviation from approved plans requires extensive documentation and regulatory approval, making Waterfall’s comprehensive upfront planning essential.
Similarly, Ireland’s construction sector, experiencing unprecedented growth with projects like the National Development Plan’s €165 billion infrastructure investment, benefits from Waterfall’s predictability. When you’re building a new DART line or upgrading water treatment facilities, you can’t easily change the specifications mid-project.
The public sector also gravitates towards Waterfall for compliance and procurement reasons. Government projects typically require detailed specifications before contracts are awarded, fixed-price agreements, and extensive documentation for accountability, all areas where Waterfall’s structured approach aligns naturally.
Predictability: Clear timelines, defined budgets, and explicit deliverables make it easier to secure funding and manage stakeholder expectations.
Documentation: Comprehensive records at each phase create an audit trail essential for regulatory compliance and knowledge transfer.
Resource Planning: Knowing the project phases in advance allows for efficient allocation of specialised resources when needed.
Stakeholder Clarity: Non-technical stakeholders appreciate being able to review and approve complete plans before implementation begins.
Inflexibility: Once you’ve moved past a phase, making changes becomes expensive and time-consuming. This rigidity can be problematic when market conditions shift or new information emerges.
Late Testing: Problems often surface during the testing phase, by which point substantial resources have been invested. Fixing fundamental issues discovered late can derail budgets and timelines.
Limited Customer Input: End users typically don’t see the product until it’s nearly complete, increasing the risk of building something that doesn’t fully meet their needs.
Long Time to Value: In fast-moving sectors, the months or years required to complete a Waterfall project can mean launching a solution that’s already outdated.
Agile emerged in 2001 when 17 software developers, frustrated with Waterfall’s limitations, created the Agile Manifesto. Rather than a single methodology, Agile methodology represents a philosophy emphasising flexibility, collaboration, and continuous delivery.
Instead of one large project cycle, Agile breaks work into small iterations called sprints (typically 1-4 weeks):
Sprint Planning: The team selects a manageable set of features or user stories to deliver in the upcoming sprint, prioritising based on business value.
Daily Collaboration: Short daily meetings keep everyone aligned, surfacing blockers quickly and maintaining momentum.
Iterative Development: Teams build, test, and refine working software incrementally, with each sprint producing something potentially shippable.
Sprint Review: At sprint’s end, the team demonstrates completed work to stakeholders, gathering immediate feedback.
Retrospective: The team reflects on what worked well and what needs improvement, continuously refining their process.
This cycle repeats, with priorities adjusted based on learnings, stakeholder feedback, and changing business needs.
Scrum: The most widely adopted framework, particularly in Dublin’s tech sector. Clear roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team) and ceremonies (sprint planning, daily standups, retrospectives) provide structure within flexibility.
Kanban: Favoured by operations and support teams, Kanban visualises workflow, limits work in progress, and emphasises continuous delivery rather than fixed sprints.
Hybrid Approaches: Many Irish organisations blend Agile practices with traditional governance, using Scrum for development whilst maintaining Waterfall structures for programme management and compliance.
Ireland’s technology sector, home to European headquarters for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and hundreds of startups, has embraced Agile as standard practice. When Stripe expanded its Dublin engineering hub, it adopted Agile to maintain the rapid iteration cycles essential for fintech innovation.
The financial services sector has also pivoted towards Agile. AIB and Bank of Ireland have established Agile centres of excellence to accelerate digital transformation initiatives, recognising that customer expectations for digital banking evolve faster than traditional development cycles allow.
Irish startups, particularly in Dublin’s Silicon Docks and Cork’s innovation district, default to Agile almost universally. When you’re building a SaaS product or mobile app with evolving requirements and tight cash runway, Agile’s emphasis on working software and customer feedback provides crucial advantages.
Flexibility: Changing requirements mid-project isn’t a crisis, it’s expected and managed through the backlog prioritisation process.
Early Value Delivery: Working features are delivered incrementally, allowing organisations to realise value throughout the project rather than waiting for final completion.
Continuous Feedback: Regular stakeholder involvement ensures the solution evolves to meet actual needs rather than assumptions made months earlier.
Risk Mitigation: Problems surface quickly, whilst there’s still time and budget to address them effectively.
Team Empowerment: Self-organising teams make decisions collaboratively, improving morale and leveraging diverse expertise.
Requires Experience: Agile teams need members comfortable with ambiguity, able to make decisions collaboratively, and experienced in their craft. Junior teams can struggle without strong coaching.
Stakeholder Commitment: Agile demands significant time from product owners and business stakeholders. Organisations used to “sign off and wait” can find this intensive engagement challenging.
Scope Uncertainty: The flexibility that makes Agile powerful also makes it harder to commit to fixed budgets and timelines upfront, a challenge for procurement and contracting.
Documentation Gaps: Whilst Agile values “working software over comprehensive documentation,” this can create knowledge gaps and compliance issues in regulated environments.
Scaling Complexity: Coordinating multiple Agile teams working on interdependent components requires additional frameworks (like SAFe or LeSS) and governance overhead.
Understanding how these methodologies diverge helps clarify which suits your project:
Waterfall completes all planning upfront. Requirements are frozen, designs approved, and budgets locked before implementation begins. Changes trigger formal change control processes.
Agile plans continuously. High-level vision is established early, but detailed planning happens iteratively. Requirements emerge and evolve based on learning and feedback.
Waterfall assigns specialists to specific phases. Designers complete their work and hand off to developers; developers hand off to testers. Clear role definitions and hierarchical approval chains.
Agile forms cross-functional teams with all needed skills. Everyone collaborates throughout each sprint, with roles like Product Owner and Scrum Master facilitating rather than directing.
Waterfall engages stakeholders heavily during requirements and design, then at key approval gates. Day-to-day development happens largely without customer input.
Agile embeds stakeholders throughout. Product Owners represent customer needs continuously; sprint reviews solicit regular feedback; priorities adjust based on evolving understanding.
Waterfall treats changes as exceptions requiring formal processes, cost-benefit analysis, and stakeholder approval. Late changes are particularly expensive.
Agile embraces change as natural and valuable. Backlog items can be reprioritised between sprints; learnings from one iteration directly inform the next.
Waterfall tests comprehensively after development completes. Issues discovered during testing may require revisiting earlier phases.
Agile integrates testing throughout development. Each sprint includes testing of new features; continuous integration catches problems early when they’re cheaper to fix.
Waterfall produces extensive documentation at each phase, requirements specs, design documents, test plans, deployment guides.
Agile creates lighter documentation focused on maintaining working knowledge rather than comprehensive records. User stories capture requirements; code comments and automated tests serve as living documentation.
The methodology you choose should align with your project’s characteristics, organisational context, and stakeholder needs. Here’s how to evaluate your situation:
Requirements are clear and stable. If you’re replacing a known system with defined functionality, like upgrading Ireland’s M50 tolling system, requirements are well understood and unlikely to change significantly.
Regulatory compliance is paramount. Ireland’s pharmaceutical, medical device, and financial services sectors operate under strict regulatory frameworks. Waterfall’s comprehensive documentation and phase-gate approvals align with validation requirements.
Contracts are fixed-price. When you’re bidding on public sector tenders with fixed scopes and prices, or working with vendors who require detailed specifications upfront, Waterfall provides the structure needed for these arrangements.
Stakeholders expect certainty. Some organisations and industries prioritise predictability over flexibility. If your board needs to see the entire plan and budget before approving investment, Waterfall delivers that clarity.
The project involves physical construction. Building infrastructure, factories, or equipment follows inherently sequential processes. You can’t test the electrical systems before the building is constructed.
Requirements will evolve. If you’re developing a new digital product for a market you’re still understanding, like creating Ireland’s first carbon trading platform, Agile’s iterative approach lets you learn and adapt.
Speed to market matters. When competitive advantage depends on launching quickly and iterating based on market response, Agile’s incremental delivery and course correction capabilities provide clear advantages.
Innovation is the goal. Projects exploring new technologies, business models, or customer experiences benefit from Agile’s experimental mindset and tolerance for early failure.
Customer feedback is essential. If success depends on meeting user needs that aren’t fully known upfront, like designing a citizen-facing government service, Agile’s continuous stakeholder involvement proves invaluable.
The work is primarily software-based. Software development naturally suits iterative approaches, and Ireland’s tech sector has built strong Agile capabilities over the past decade.
Teams are experienced and self-directing. Agile thrives when team members are skilled in their domains, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to collaborate effectively without heavy management oversight.
Many Irish organisations find hybrid models deliver the best of both worlds:
Programme-level Waterfall, project-level Agile: Use Waterfall structures for overall programme governance, compliance, and cross-project dependencies whilst allowing individual workstreams to operate using Agile.
Defined core with Agile enhancement: Build the essential, well-understood foundation using Waterfall, then layer on innovative features using Agile iterations.
Disciplined Agile: Apply Agile principles within governance frameworks required for regulated environments, maintaining sprint ceremonies and iterative delivery whilst producing documentation and approvals needed for compliance.
Ireland’s Central Bank has successfully adopted hybrid approaches for technology modernisation, using traditional project governance for risk and compliance whilst enabling development teams to work in Agile sprints.
Ireland’s diverse economy means different sectors face distinct project management realities:
The overwhelming default is Agile, particularly Scrum. Ireland’s tech multinationals and startups have built deep Agile expertise, with roles like Scrum Master and Product Owner well established. The challenge often isn’t whether to use Agile but how to scale it effectively across growing organisations.
Waterfall dominates due to regulatory requirements, though some companies are adopting Agile for early-stage research and development whilst maintaining Waterfall for manufacturing and validation. Hybrid approaches are gaining traction, particularly for digital initiatives within traditionally Waterfall organisations.
A sector in transition. Core banking systems and regulatory programmes typically follow Waterfall, but digital banking, mobile apps, and customer-facing innovations increasingly use Agile. Many Irish banks now run parallel operating models, traditional for legacy systems, Agile for new capabilities.
Waterfall remains standard for physical construction, though some firms are experimenting with Agile concepts for aspects like planning or stakeholder engagement. The sequential nature of building, foundations before walls before roof, limits how much methodology flexibility is practical.
Ireland’s public sector is gradually embracing Agile for digital services and citizen-facing applications, influenced by the UK’s Government Digital Service and similar initiatives. However, procurement rules, accountability requirements, and traditional governance often necessitate hybrid approaches rather than pure Agile.
Once you’ve determined the right approach, successful implementation requires more than declaring “we’re doing Agile now” or “this is a Waterfall project.”
Invest in requirements definition: Gather comprehensive requirements upfront through workshops, interviews, and prototyping. The better your initial understanding, the fewer expensive changes later.
Plan phase gates carefully: Define clear criteria for advancing from each phase. Ensure stakeholders understand their approval responsibilities and commit to meeting review deadlines.
Document thoroughly but pragmatically: Create the documentation needed for knowledge transfer and compliance, but avoid documentation for its own sake. Focus on information future teams will actually need.
Build in contingency: Even with careful planning, surprises emerge. Budget 10-20% contingency for scope changes and unforeseen challenges.
Manage change formally: Establish a change control board and process. Evaluate change requests based on value, cost, and timeline impact before approving.
Train the entire organisation: Agile success requires understanding across the organisation, not just the delivery team. Product Owners, stakeholders, and executives need to understand their roles in an Agile environment.
Start with coaching: Bring in experienced Agile coaches or hire Scrum Masters with proven track records. Agile is simple to understand but challenging to execute well; expert guidance during the transition pays dividends.
Establish a clear product backlog: Whilst requirements evolve, you still need a prioritised list of desired features and outcomes. Product Owners must work continuously to maintain and refine this backlog.
Secure stakeholder commitment: Ensure Product Owners and key stakeholders can commit the time Agile requires. Half-hearted engagement undermines the methodology’s core benefits.
Create a “Definition of Done”: Establish clear criteria for when work is truly complete, code written, tested, documented, and deployable. This prevents ambiguity and ensures quality.
Embrace the retrospective: The retrospective is where teams improve their process. Create psychological safety for honest discussion and commit to implementing agreed improvements.
Be explicit about boundaries: Clearly define which parts of your project follow which methodology and why. Ambiguity breeds confusion and conflict.
Translate between methodologies: Ensure governance bodies understand how Agile delivery maps to their Waterfall expectations. Translate sprint outcomes into stage gate language when needed.
Align cadences: Coordinate Waterfall phase gates with Agile release cycles to avoid mismatched expectations and unnecessary overhead.
Maintain appropriate documentation: Determine what documentation is truly required for compliance or knowledge transfer versus what’s habit. Produce the former, eliminate the latter.
This misconception leads to chaos. Agile plans continuously rather than avoiding planning. Product roadmaps, sprint planning, and backlog refinement are all planning activities, just done iteratively rather than all upfront.
Whilst Waterfall is less flexible than Agile, good Waterfall practice includes structured change management processes. The methodology isn’t inherently rigid; poor implementation makes it so.
Many organisations claim Agile whilst maintaining command-and-control management, requiring comprehensive upfront specifications, or never delivering working software between the start and end of projects. This “WAgile” or “Agile in name only” delivers neither Waterfall’s predictability nor Agile’s adaptability.
Organisations sometimes mandate a single methodology enterprise-wide. In reality, different project types benefit from different approaches. Allow methodology choice based on project characteristics rather than blanket policies.
The most important thing isn’t whether you’re Waterfall or Agile, it’s whether you’re delivering value to stakeholders and achieving business objectives. Don’t let methodology become more important than results.
Ireland’s project landscape is evolving. Several trends are shaping how Irish organisations approach project delivery:
Regulatory technology is driving Agile adoption in traditional sectors. Compliance projects that once defaulted to Waterfall now use Agile to respond quickly to changing regulations and to deliver incremental improvements rather than big-bang implementations.
Remote work is influencing collaboration patterns. Agile ceremonies and Waterfall phase gates have adapted to hybrid and remote environments. Tools like Miro, Jira, and Microsoft Teams have become essential infrastructure for both methodologies.
AI and automation are changing project scope. As AI tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT accelerate certain tasks, project managers are rethinking how work is decomposed and estimated in both Waterfall and Agile contexts.
Sustainability requirements are adding complexity. Ireland’s Climate Action Plan is introducing new considerations for project planning and delivery, requiring both methodologies to incorporate environmental impact assessments and circular economy principles.
The Waterfall vs Agile debate often generates more heat than light. In Ireland’s diverse economy, both methodologies have legitimate places.
Waterfall provides the structure, predictability, and comprehensive planning essential for regulated industries, physical construction, and contexts where requirements are genuinely stable and stakeholders need upfront certainty.
Agile offers the flexibility, rapid learning, and continuous stakeholder collaboration critical for innovation, software development, and situations where understanding emerges through delivery rather than upfront analysis.
Most importantly, the choice isn’t binary. Hybrid approaches allow organisations to use Waterfall’s governance and Agile’s delivery practices in combination, or to apply different methodologies to different parts of their project portfolio.
The question facing Irish project managers isn’t “which methodology is better?” but rather “which approach fits my project’s specific context, constraints, and success criteria?”
Answer that question honestly, implement your chosen approach with discipline and continuous improvement, and focus relentlessly on delivering value to your stakeholders. That’s what separates successful projects from failed ones, not which methodology name appears on the project charter.
About the Institute of Project Management
Founded in Ireland in 1989, the Institute of Project Management is the specialist body in project management education and training. Whether you’re looking to master Agile frameworks, develop Waterfall expertise, or gain the strategic perspective to choose the right approach for each project, IPM offers professionally recognised certifications and training programmes designed for the Irish market.
Explore our Certified Project Management Diploma, Agile Project Management Diploma, and Scrum Project Professional® certification to advance your project management career.
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