Choosing for community work

Community projects are almost never pure waterfall or pure agile. The skill is reading which mode the moment is in.

A community gala is a waterfall problem until the day-of, and an agile problem in the last 72 hours. A membership drive is an agile problem until the report is due to the board, and a waterfall problem the week before. A policy campaign is mostly agile, except for the testimony you have to deliver on the date the committee meets.

The two questions to ask: How fixed is the destination? How fast does the situation move? If the destination is fixed and the situation is stable, lean waterfall. If the destination is open or the situation is moving fast, lean agile. Most community projects are somewhere in between, and the mix changes over the project's life.

A useful move is to draw the project as a horizontal timeline and mark each chunk as W or A. The big anchor events (legislative date, election day, gala) are W. The phases between them — design, recruit, plan, learn — are usually A. The PM's job is keeping the mode legible to the team so people are not running an agile sprint when the boss thinks it is a waterfall phase.

A note for community projects: pure agile can drift. Without the discipline of named deliverables, two months of "we are iterating" can produce zero shippable work. Borrow waterfall's deliverable gates even in agile cycles. End every two-week cycle with one thing a member could actually use.