In many enterprise and regulated environments, software development teams struggle to strike the right balance between predictability and adaptability. Traditional Waterfall offers structure, documentation, and control, while Scrum provides speed, iteration, and continuous improvement. Rather than choosing one over the other, many organizations have moved toward a hybrid model known as Water–Scrum–Fall (WSF).

According to Gartner (2023), 58% of large enterprises now use hybrid agile frameworks rather than pure Agile or pure Waterfall. The reason is simple: hybrid approaches allow teams to innovate while remaining compliant with governance, audit, and organizational delivery standards.

What is Water Scrum Fall?

Water Scrum Fall is a project management method where:

Water is used during project initiation and requirements.
Scrum is used during development and testing.
Fall is used again during deployment and release.

It looks like this:

Source: P79 Documentation

Visually, the workflow is typically depicted as:

The visual structure: Water → Scrum → Fall shows that:

The project starts with structured planning, ensuring clarity.
The team then shifts into adaptive development, enabling speed and iteration.
Finally, the workflow returns to a controlled release phase, ensuring compliance and stability.

This combination balances stability and flexibility, making Water–Scrum–Fall an ideal approach for enterprise projects that need both agility and governance.

How Water Scrum Fall Works

The Water–Scrum–Fall workflow is divided into three interconnected phases. Each corresponds to a typical block shown in the standard WSF diagram.

1. Water: Requirements & Planning

The first block in the diagram highlights the Water phase, where the project is shaped through structured and sequential activities. These steps ensure a solid foundation before development begins. The key components shown in the image are:

Business Planning – defining the business need, goals, risks, and expected outcomes.
Budgeting – determining cost estimates, financial feasibility, and resource allocation.
Designing – creating initial system architecture, workflow mapping, and design concepts.
Requirement Gathering – identifying user needs and documenting functional and technical specifications.
Estimating – calculating time, resources, and complexity before handing work to the development team.

This phase aligns with the Waterfall mindset—structured, documentation-heavy, and focused on clarity and predictability. It establishes the baseline so the Scrum team can work efficiently during the next phase.

2. Scrum: Development & Testing

The middle block of the diagram shows the Scrum phase with a single keyword: Developing. This represents the iterative development cycle where the team builds the product in small increments.

During this stage:

Work is broken into sprints (typically 1–3 weeks).
The Product Owner refines and prioritizes the backlog.
Daily stand‑ups help maintain alignment and remove blockers.
Each sprint ends with a review to gather feedback and a retrospective to improve processes.

Although the diagram visually simplifies this phase into one block labeled “Developing,” the underlying process involves continuous iteration, feedback‑driven adjustments, and incremental delivery, core principles of Scrum.

3. Fall: Release, Deployment & Final Sign-Off

The final block in the diagram represents the Fall phase, where the workflow transitions back to a structured process similar to Waterfall. This happens once development is complete and the product must be prepared for release.

The diagram lists three activities:

Integrating – combining developed components, validating compatibility, and ensuring system cohesion
Testing – performing QA, UAT, regression tests, security checks, and compliance validation.
Releasing – completing documentation, conducting training if required, and deploying the product in a controlled, formal release process.

This phase ensures quality, reliability, and organizational compliance before the solution is delivered to users.

At a high level (ownership by phase), the workflow looks like this:

Why Companies Use Water Scrum Fall

Many organizations, especially in enterprise, banking, manufacturing, and government sectors, need both structure and flexibility. Water Scrum Fall offers a balance between control and agility.

Clear Requirements and Predictable Budget : The initial Waterfall phase defines requirements, scope, timeline, and costs. According to PMI (2023), unclear or shifting requirements often cause project failure. Defining them upfront provides predictability and stakeholder confidence.
Flexibility During Development : When development begins, the process shifts to Scrum. Teams work in short sprints with regular reviews, refining features based on feedback. Harvard Business Review (2022) notes that iterative delivery boosts responsiveness and reduces wasted effort, maintaining agility within planned boundaries.
Compliance and Documentation : In regulated sectors like banking, manufacturing, or BUMN, documentation and approvals are essential. Pure Scrum lacks formal sign-offs, posing audit risks. Deloitte Tech Trends (2024) found that hybrid Agile is 2.5x more common in such environments due to governance needs. Waterfall ensures compliance without sacrificing agility.
Better Visibility and Control : Water Scrum Fall enhances both executive oversight and team transparency: executives track milestones and budgets, while developers show progress through sprints and backlogs. Gartner (2023) reports that 58% of enterprise projects now use hybrid Agile models for improved visibility and reduced delivery risks.

Case Example: IBM and Hybrid Agile

IBM is one of the strongest real-world examples of adopting a hybrid agile model similar to Water Scrum Fall. The company applies structured planning and documentation at the start of projects, then shifts into Scrum during development, and switches back to a controlled release phase resembling Waterfall.

This model is heavily used in IBM Garage, IBM’s digital transformation framework.

According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study on IBM Garage (Forrester, 2020):

Organizations that adopted IBM’s hybrid agile approach achieved

102 percent ROI over three years
67 percent faster time-to-market
6× more projects released into production

IBM’s key insight is that hybrid agile reduces friction between business stakeholders and technical teams. Instead of waiting until the end, stakeholders see progress every sprint, while documentation and governance remain intact.

“Hybrid agile helps align business expectations while reducing change request delays.” – IBM Garage Impact Summary (2023)

This proves that hybrid methods like Water Scrum Fall are not compromises, but strategic accelerators in large enterprise environments.

Benefits of Water Scrum Fall

Water Scrum Fall combines the structure of Waterfall with the flexibility of Scrum, creating a balanced and efficient project framework.

Predictability: Upfront planning defines scope, cost, and timeline clearly, allowing accurate forecasting and giving stakeholders confidence in delivery outcomes.
Flexibility: Scrum sprints let teams adapt to feedback, improve features, and refine products without disrupting the overall plan.
Compliance: The model supports documentation and approval requirements, making it suitable for regulated sectors such as banking, government, and manufacturing.
Transparency: Regular sprint reviews and progress updates ensure visibility for both executives and developers, improving collaboration and accountability.

Because of these benefits, Water Scrum Fall is widely used by IT service providers, software and mobile app developers, and application development companies that work with enterprises or BUMN clients.

Common Use Cases

Water Scrum Fall is ideal for projects that need both control and flexibility. It suits organizations with a PMO structure, where every phase requires formal approval and documentation, yet the development process may evolve over time.

This approach works best in industries that must meet compliance or audit standards but still want to stay adaptive to change. Teams can update requirements during the Scrum phase while keeping the overall project plan stable.

In short, Water Scrum Fall fits organizations that need control, compliance, and adaptability in one framework.

Where IT Staff Augmentation Fits

IT Staff Augmentation is a perfect complement to the Water Scrum Fall approach, especially during the development or Scrum phase. It allows companies to stay flexible by bringing in additional experts only when needed, without the commitment of permanent hires.

Instead of recruiting full-time employees, organizations can temporarily onboard software engineers, mobile app developers, UI/UX designers, or IT consultants to strengthen their teams during high-demand periods. This helps accelerate sprint delivery, handle complex technical tasks, and maintain quality under tight deadlines.

This model is both cost-efficient and scalable, enabling businesses to respond quickly to changing project needs while keeping long-term staffing risks low. It fits perfectly within Water Scrum Fall’s structure, combining the predictability of planning with the agility required for fast-paced development.

"As a Back End Developer, clear specifications, design, and task management are important. With the Water Scrum Fall method, developers can work with more confidence when taking on tasks, estimating workloads, and executing the development process. This is because the specifications and design are clearly defined at the beginning, while still remaining open to changes through regular reviews and feedback in each sprint." Yana Nuryana, Back End Developer PT. Padepokan Tujuh Sembilan

Conclusion

Water Scrum Fall is not a compromise. It is a strategic hybrid framework that enables software development teams to move fast while maintaining structure and compliance. It blends the best of both worlds:

Waterfall for clarity and predictability
Scrum for adaptability and continuous improvement

This method minimizes risk, improves stakeholder confidence, and accelerates software delivery for enterprise environments.

If your organization needs support adopting Water Scrum Fall or scaling your development capacity, PT Padepokan 79 provides IT Staff Augmentation and Software Development Services to help execute projects faster, smarter, and more efficiently.

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References

Source (open access PDF): https://media.trustradius.com/product-downloadables/XE/9E/7RRVJ9GSV8PT.pdf
Another publicly accessible summary ensures the same numbers:
https://papers.governing.com/The-Total-Economic-Impact-Of-IBM-Garage-139861.html
Gartner. (2023). State of Agile and Hybrid Project Delivery. https://www.gartner.com
PMI. (2023). Pulse of the Profession: Hybrid Delivery. https://www.pmi.org
Harvard Business Review. (2022). Agile at Scale. https://hbr.org
IBM Agile Practices. (2023). https://www.ibm.com/topics/agile