Technical jargon: What does "iterative" actually mean?

The word "iterative" comes from the Latin "iter" (way) and its descendant is making its way through many projects in our industry. The Chinese philosopher Confucius, too, had already advocated being iterative around 500 BC with the statement "The way is the goal". In mathematics, it means approaching the exact solution step by step in repeated calculations, also called estimating in High German and often confused with pröbeln in Swiss German. And because mathematicians are more in demand than philosophers in our industry at the moment anyway, the king of the iterative process is definitely called an algorithm.

Buzzword as an excuse 

The marketing world is teeming with kings, which is why the fashionable adjective has recently been encountered more and more often by those who spend their time in poorly facilitated workshops or poorly managed web or IT projects. But what does it mean exactly?
Ideally, iterative progress is made together step by step toward the goal. The process model is currently in vogue because agile action is demanded everywhere. However, this often conceals lazy excuses rather than truly goal-oriented and groundbreaking working methods.

Regardless of whether for software, organizational or employee development: continuous improvement, which often proceeds in small or even the smallest steps, should just be given a name. But beware, behind each iteration are various project phases that must be passed through, all of which offer opportunities for distraction, failure, or standing still: Plan, Analyze, Design, Implement, Test, Deploy. Each completed stage, in the best case, delivers a working intermediate state of development, but in most cases, people go round in circles together without making a single step forward and act as if it were self-evident and completely unproblematic.

What usually remains is confusion on the part of the client or the philosophical realization that "the goal must have been in the way". Especially when, weeks and thousands of francs later, the project is still not finished and no one wants to remember the original budgets and timelines.