From the course: Project Management: Technical Projects

Hybrid variations

From the course: Project Management: Technical Projects

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Hybrid variations

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- Hybrid methodologies remind me of ice cream. Bear with me here. Ice cream comes in several flavors, many of which can be combined. Hybrid is the same. It isn't just a simple blend of waterfall and agile. Let's examine the hybrid approach by discussing different examples. An office move I was associated with used a hybrid approach, starting with a traditional waterfall approach for the requirements and planning phases. This led us to understand what facilities we needed and how each department's needs differ. This included power requirements, network connectivity, offices needed, cubicle space, and conference room needs. After that is where it got interesting. The actual move was done using agile principles and we transitioned one department at a time. We would look at each department and understand how busy they were at that moment, if there were people out of the office, which would make the move awkward, and if customers had unusual demands each department was handling. Based on this information, we created a short-term schedule. We might decide, "Okay, this department is going to move on Tuesday and that department will move on Thursday." But here's the agile part. We might change the sequence from one day to the next based on what was happening with customers or staff, so each feature, if you will, was moving a department and we determined the sequence using a very short, rotating, and reprioritized schedule. My second example is creating a management statistics dashboard for a public utility company. This project involved working with new, web-based apps and old legacy applications. These older applications were challenging to work with because they had a lot of interfaces to other areas of the business. We used a waterfall approach for this project to develop the initial requirements. It was high level, but it gave us a starting point. Then we planned out how we would produce the dashboard components. Here's where it gets hybrid. Some dashboard features were built using waterfall, while others used agile methods. For the old systems we needed to draw data from, we used a very traditional approach, performing high-level planning, detailed-level planning, writing the code, then testing. For the web-based applications, which were easier to deal with, we ran in a very agile manner. We would write, test, and then turn over a bit of code. Senior executives would review what we'd done and ask for adjustments. We'd make those changes and move to the next prioritized feature. We then brought those two approaches together to assemble a final product. So, as you can see, hybrid project management is all about flexibility and using the right approach for each part of your project. It's not strictly following one methodology, but adapting and combining methods to best suit your project needs. Do it right and you get a fantastic hybrid flavor, but probably not as good as ice cream. (laughs)

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