I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
As I am a consultant I get many interesting experiences from different assignments and organisations. This retrospective is from a Swedish multinational retail company running appr. ten fairly large parallell IT projects heavily integrated into oneanother. My role was as a Business Analyst, meaning I was responsible together with 4 other BAs to collect and document requirements in one of these projects.
The organisation has since a few years back adopted RUP in a very heavy document-driven way. Although RUP is meant to be iterative everyone from project manager to developer is thinking “waterfall”, which means that we collect and sign off all requirements before the developers are willing to accept them.
When the organisation notices that the results aren’t that great they add QA reviews to make sure we really follow the process. However the QA guys also think “waterfall”, since they just check that we have all the necessary documents, that no one will ever read. No one seem to really question the fact that we didn’t deploy anything the first two years. Unbelievable!
This organisation would really benefit from agile methods, such as Scrum.
For anyone in a similar situation I would really recommend reading the following whitepaper:
How to fail with RUP: Seven Steps to Pain and Suffering.