Hybrid Project Management

Using Agile with Traditional PM Methodologies to Succeed on Modern Projects

Mark Tolbert, Susan Parente

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781952538346
• eBook ISBN: 9781952538353
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Compared to a few decades ago, companies today are faced with a much more challenging environment providing successful products and solutions for their customers. They are dealing with global competition, very rapid change in technologies, and tremendous volatility in economic conditions. As project managers, we are helping our companies survive in this difficult landscape. We are "agents of change" and "drivers of change."

The most important project management methodology today that will help us deal with this change and this volatility is Agile. However, no one process or project management methodology fits all situations! Agile is not a panacea for all projects. Many times, our projects are large enough and complex enough that some parts of the project are best suited to using a predictive planning approach, and other parts are more suited to using Agile. Therefore, a hybrid approach that mixes the traditional, waterfall approach with Agile is really required in many situations today.

The agile community oftentimes has quite a negative view of hybrid approaches. Key writers on Agile often say that attempting to use hybrid will corrupt all attempts to use Agile, and will result in failure. In this book, the argument is made that integrating these methodologies can be done if approached the right way, and in fact, this is necessary today.

CHAPTER 1

Hybrid Projects: The Need to Be Open to Different Project Management Methodologies

Introduction

I think as project managers (PMs), we often get too wedded to one particular methodology, and we think that this one methodology has to be used in all situations. We become purists for this one approach. Perhaps the methodology is Scrum or Extreme Programming (XP), and we think that this is the modern solution for all projects, and can and should be used on all projects. We think waterfall and traditional approaches are a thing of the past, and only something our fathers once had to use. There are much better ways to do things today!¹

Perhaps it’s the other way around. Maybe there’s a particular methodology or set of processes that our program management office (PMO) insists must be used on all projects. For example, the PMO stipulates that for all projects, there must be a formally approved project charter that is issued by the sponsor before any work is started. Additionally, there must be a written, formally approved project management plan with a minimum of 18 component pieces including formally approved baselines. The scope baseline must include the scope statement, a WBS (work breakdown structure), and WBS dictionary. There must be “management plans” that define how work and processes will be done in all nine Knowledge Areas except Integration Management. This formal project management plan must be approved before the “execution phases” of the project are started. Therefore, we will do predictive planning and move through the phases of the project in a waterfall fashion. Furthermore, Earned Value Management (EVM) must always be used to measure our project’s progress against the baselines. This is our culture, and the PMO requires that this approach and set of processes be followed on all projects.

But this is too limiting and too narrow-minded, is it not? We need to be more versatile and more open-minded. We need to recognize that no one methodology or process is perfect for all situations. Isn’t it also the case that most of our projects are probably large enough and complex enough that parts of the project are very suitable for the tried-and-true traditional methods, or waterfall methods, and other parts require creativity and exploring requirements, so they are much more suitable to Agile? On a large, complex project, isn’t it likely that some parts are “cookie-cutter,” so to speak? These parts involve work-packages or items that we’ve done many times in the past, and we have very good historical records for these parts or work-packages. For these parts, we know in detail starting out exactly what the requirements are, and what the relative priorities are of the requirements. “The customer knows exactly what they want at the beginning.” These historical records will allow us to obtain very good estimates of time and cost, and very good templates of different types of key documents that can be used in our project. Therefore, for these parts of the project, it will probably make sense to use predictive planning or a waterfall approach and also have a fully accountable PM² who is assigning all the work to the different team members. Perhaps many of these parts of the project will be subcontracted out to external vendors, and the work will be performed under a fixed-price contract. We must have all the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed! There is an extensive Statement of Work (SOW), and again, it will make most sense to use the traditional approach.

For these “cookie-cutter projects” or “cookie-cutter parts of projects,” why does it make a lot of sense to use predictive planning, a waterfall approach, and have the traditional, fully accountable PM? Because it is much less expensive and far more efficient to do so! Use the “KISS” principle: “Keep It Simple Stupid!” or “Occam’s Razor”—“Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity.” With Agile, we want to have a team made up of 5 to 10 senior, dedicated members. That’s going to be very expensive in most cases. Furthermore, ideally, we want them to be colocated. That’s also going to be very tough to do in many cases today in our modern project world and also very expensive. In the situation where we know exactly what is needed starting out in the project, this is not necessary. We can go with the traditional predictive planning model, which is much leaner and more efficient, and accomplish our goals in the same amount of time and for far less money.

Many of the projects I’ve worked on in my career at Hewlett-Packard were of this nature. These were “logistics projects”—data center relocations or large “rollouts” as we called them. We were refreshing the client PCs and other supporting servers for a large customer at numerous office sites, we had done these types of projects many times before, and we had very good historical records that gave us excellent estimates of time and cost.³ So it did make sense to have a traditional PM, who was totally accountable for the project, doing predictive planning, and handing out all the parts of the plans of the project to the different team members and subcontractors. These team members were working part-time on the project and were multitasking between a number of projects.

Also, the resources on my projects were often spread out over a large geography, so it would be impractical to have them colocated. That would also increase the cost and in most cases would not be something that management was readily agreeable to. Again, in my project world, we were using virtual teams spread out over a large geography in almost all cases, and the team members and subcontractors were working on multiple projects at the same time.

The Landscape for Projects Today

However, I think the types of projects most of us are dealing with today are much different than what I just described. How would you describe our world today for project management? What good adjectives or descriptive phrases would you use to describe this world that we find ourselves in? I think it’s a more difficult, more challenging world today than it was for PMs just a couple of decades ago. The pace of change has increased in amazing ways. Some catchphrases that seem to apply to our world today are:

• “Make dust or eat dust!”

• “If you are standing still, you are falling behind!”

• “The only constant is change!” (This is from 500 BC—Ancient Greek philosophy—Heraclitus!)

• Companies are dealing with global marketplaces, and more competition than ever.

• Customers are very demanding, very fickle.

• The need to adapt to changing marketplace conditions is greater than ever.

• “Change or Die!”

We are dealing with a much tougher competitive landscape today—we will say more about that momentarily—but change is occurring much more quickly than it ever did before, our customers are more demanding than ever, they’re more fickle, and, therefore, it’s tougher for companies today. They have to constantly find new products, new services, and new solutions that respond to the new demands of their customers. They must adapt to the changing landscape of what customers are looking for. I think Jeff Sutherland sums it up best in his book, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. He simply says, “Change or die!”

I think Thomas Friedman, in several of his more recent books, explains very well how and why we have reached this new age: an age of tremendous change and increased competition. He terms this new age an “Age of Accelerations.” He has written three books that all address this topic: the first book was The World Is Flat, the second book That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented (a fairly scary and eye-opening book for those of us who live in the United States), and the third book Thank You for Being Late. Each book builds on the themes and key points made in the preceding books. Friedman points out there were two things that happened together over two decades ago in the early 1990s. First, it was the breakup of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s that ushered in a new era of globalization in the early 1990s. That brought new countries into our capitalist marketplaces, and this raised the bar of competition in very significant ways. Of course, we’re talking about China, but also India, and many other countries.

Something else also happened at the same time in the early 1990s that was a tremendous game changer. Of course, that was the advent of the Internet, and the Internet has changed almost everything about how we live, how we play, and how we do business and work. Global teams can collaborate on work, share documents, and communicate in very creative and new ways.

Here is another type of example of how the Internet has changed our world. Imagine that a group of young entrepreneurs has come together with an idea for a new business solution. The team is confident this business solution is going to have a lot of appeal to people and make a big impact. They don’t need the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar manufacturing operation to produce the products they are envisioning—they can outsource that. For advertising and marketing, they can outsource that too. They can even find very creative ways to get financing to provide the necessary funding for this opportunity. Bottom line, it’s much easier today for people to form new companies to go after opportunities, and people are doing exactly that today. This has raised the level of competition in major ways. A number of different writers say that the Internet has brought about as profound a change in our world as the Gutenberg printing press did in the 15th century. So, in short, we’re living in this age of accelerations with tremendous change and a heightened level of competition.

Why does this matter to us as PMs? Why do we care about all this volatility, difficult marketplaces, and the challenges our companies are facing? Of course, it’s simply because we are helping our companies survive in these difficult times. We are managing change for them, and we are helping our companies create the new products and solutions that will resonate with customers. We are drivers of change in this new world! Therefore, our companies need us to be very good at managing projects and to be up-to-speed with the latest methodologies. So, what project management methodology is best suited for coping with change and handling volatility? Of course, that’s an easy answer; the answer is Agile! But we shouldn’t discard the tried and true—the traditional waterfall approaches. As we’ll see, this methodology also has an important role in many projects. We need to be open-minded and know when and where to use the different approaches and the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches.

The Roots of Modern Project Management and the Case for Traditional Project Management

From what industry did project management arise and who wrote the first books and anthologies on project management? It was the construction and engineering industry that provided the foundations of our modern project management practices. The first authors of college textbooks on project management were engineering professors: people like Clelland and King (1968) and Harold Kerzner (1979).

Some people might say that modern project management starts with Henry Gantt and Gantt charts in 1910. These were used successfully with the Hoover Dam project in the 1930s. Other people point to the 1950s with the advent of Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), which was used with the Navy Polaris Submarine program, and with critical path method (CPM), devised in the late 1950s at DuPont. Also, much of the traditional project management approach comes to us from the 1960s and the Department of Defense (DoD). Much of what we teach in our Project Management Professional (PMP^®) Prep classes is based on the core principals developed in DoD, especially EVM and the WBS. The WBS is a key part of Earned Value (EV) and is very close to the heart of the traditional PM. The WBS drives all planning, or is the “cornerstone of all planning.” It drives scheduling, cost estimating, and budgeting, determining quality acceptance values, resource estimating, identifying risks, and deciding what we want to outsource. Of course, we also have the 100 percent rule: “100 percent of the project must be in the WBS! If it’s not in the WBS, it’s not in the project!”

What is the lifecycle model that is very closely tied to traditional project management? The “waterfall lifecycle approach” and the use of predictive planning. This model entails:

• Performing exhaustive, detailed planning for all phases of the project at the beginning (“The devil is in the details!”). Therefore, don’t leave any stones unturned; figure out all requirements, in detail, in your planning phases at the beginning of the project. Plan everything so well from the beginning that change won’t be needed! As Harold Kerzner says in his textbook on project management,⁴ do planning so well that scope changes are kept to a minimum.

• Hierarchically decomposing your original business requirements and functional requirements to a very detailed level using a WBS.

• Obtaining accurate, detailed estimates for time and cost at the work-package level using techniques such as bottom-up estimating, parametric estimating, and PERT three-point estimating.

• Measuring performance during the project using EVM.

• Measuring performance against all three baselines (scope, schedule, and cost) using EVM, and using Quantitative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Abstract
• Dedication
• Inspiration for the Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Hybrid Projects: The Need to Be Open to Different Project Management Methodologies
• Chapter 2 Additional Thoughts on Agile and Hybrid Projects
• Chapter 3 Overview and Thoughts about the PMBOK® Guide. Does Agile Fit in Well with the PMBOK® Guide?
• For Further Reading – References used for this Book
• About the Authors
• Index
• Backcover