Project management used to be so straightforward. You built a plan, worked the plan and then moved on to the next thing. And then Agile came along and made things a little more complicated. But that was OK because it worked really well and having two different approaches to project management wasn’t a bad thing – it provided the opportunity to choose the right tool for the job.
But now life is getting way more complicated. Now we have to deal with hybrid project delivery. And that’s not a third option, it’s an infinite number of possibilities that take elements of Agile, combine them with elements of waterfall and come up with a unique approach that is only relevant to that particular project. For the next initiative there will be some different mix.
Usually this hybrid mix comes about when we add Agile methods as an overlay to a mainly waterfall project, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead we could use a little more formal structure to an Agile project to handle things like regulatory or executive reporting. The possibilities really are endless, and that’s where the complexity comes into it.
It becomes much harder to track and report on a collection of projects when they are all being delivered in a slightly different way. Governance and oversight become harder, consolidated reporting becomes harder, forecasts become harder – it’s just difficult. But here’s the thing. Projects aren’t created to make things easy to track. They’re created to deliver business outcomes, to improve the performance of the organization in some way. And anything that increases the chances of that happening is a very good thing. Hybrid does that.
By providing project managers and teams the freedom to build a custom approach to delivering a project that is based on the needs of that specific initiative, we allow the people doing the work to select the optimal approach to that work. We can still control that approach within defined parameters, and that’s where the PMO comes in, but we don’t mandate a ‘one size fits none’ approach just because that’s easier to track.
Still, at least it’s easy to report on.
If you’d like to learn more about the hybrid delivery model, and how it can impact your business, register for our “Managing in a Hybrid World” webinar.
Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Time: 8am - 9am PT | 11am - 12pm ET
