What the difference between Agile and Waterfall CRM Implementation Methods?

Waterfall implementation methodologies have been the norm for over two decades of CRM deployments. These approaches are often visually depicted in cascading or linear diagrams and follow a progressive sequence of phases (for example, Requirements to Design to Development to Testing to Deployment). A significant risk with this deployment approach is that it can be unforgiving as success or failure is realized in largest part at the end of the project – thereby severely limiting remediation measures if outcomes don’t match objectives.

Agile methods such as Scrum are an alternative to predictive methods such as waterfall. An agile approach defines the business goals and success criteria in smaller increments, delivers continuous subsets of high-value features and puts them in the hands of users as fast as possible. This provides the development team with faster product verification so they may continue to deliver iterations which align with user expectations or adapt their output to counter for missed or changing expectations.

Agile versus Waterfall

CRM software implementation projects place heavy emphasis on the factors of Requirements, Resources and Time. Waterfall methods presume Requirements to be fixed and Time and Resources to be projected.