Gartner report highlights that " waterfall methods were employed on 56 per cent of development projects in 2015".
Is this a key reason many banking and insurance companies are unable to take advantage of the new analytics, BI and Fintech, Insurtech platforms that agile competitors are exploiting?
"A senior analyst at a FTSE100 insurance company (who wishes to remain anonymous) explained these “cultural” problems in terms of an organization still running mainframes and handling batch processing.
“You get these guys in their 50s, with no social skills and they’re the ones who maintain the systems. The company can’t get rid of them as the kids haven’t got the right skills,” he told me".
Combine this with the traditional silos that exist between difference business units and you can see the issues. I explored this in parallel with an article by Harry Powell at Barclays- see the blog here.
Harry does offer answers.
Since the publication of the Agile Manifesto, there’s been a steady acceptance that Agile is the way to go when it comes to software development. The old waterfall method was seen as something rather quaint and old-fashioned, the equivalent of hanging onto your vinyl LPs when the rest of the world was downloading onto their iPods. And yet, just as vinyl is making a comeback so we see that waterfall is still clinging on tenaciously. In fact, it’s not just clinging on but positively ruling the roost. According to Gartner's IT Key Metrics Data, waterfall methods were employed on 56 per cent of development projects in 2015. So, given that it’s generally accepted that agile projects offer much scope for effective development, why are organisations still clinging to the old methods?
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