If there was any doubt in your mind, riding a barrel over Niagara and using a waterfall method of development are both bad ideas. Statistics can be brought to bear to convince you in both cases although technology can also improve your chances of survival.
For your options at Niagara, see here.
As for the non-death-defying activity, on October 29 I heard two IBMers—Scott Ambler, practice leader for agile development, and Terry Quatrani, Unified Modeling Language (UML) evangelist—speak at the SD Best Practices conference. Their subject was "Modeling Strategies, Philosophies, and Techniques: Traditional vs. Agile." The talk was based on Scott’s recent survey work in association with Dr. Dobbs and includes some interesting findings that apply to business process modeling as well as modeling for software development.
To sum it up, as I often say, walk before you run.
The speakers add this advice: walk fast and don’t carry a lot of baggage. That is, use the simplest tools available to get the job done; keep the documentation simple and up-to-date; sketch your interface/flow/desired-results out first before spending weeks with drawing software; work in teams, and probably most important, remember that no model (i.e., flow) is persistent (i.e., lasts forever).
They didn’t speak to business process management (BPM) specifically but for BPM, I would add—based on their advice to software developers--make sure the teams are made up of the users, business analysts and IT folks.
I heard similar advice in a session by American Home Shield on October 20 at PegaWorld—more on their presentation in an upcoming post.
-- Dennis Byron
Use of Scrum for project management
You have rightly pointed out that the old project execution techniques were useful only for traditional code based implementations. With the increase in the use of modeling techniques like BPM, Rules, Xforms, the use of agile development is more likely to give better project success and efficiency.
We at Cordys have been very successfully using Scrum based project management both in the development of the Cordys product as well for executing customer projects that make use of the model based development (almost zero coding).
Mohan Sharma
Cordys