Project Management Style Tailoring

It is commonly known that there's no right or wrong in picking what methodology you need to follow in managing your project.

In the world of IT, a successful project is the one you manage right, regardless of what methodology you would follow, however, in our region, clients push to know when, what and how much the project will cost before they sign a contract, therefore it's sort of impossible to adopt a pure Agile prospective.

In addition, in a scrum team for example, you don't get a project manager, you don't get a QC team and certainly you don't have an account manager, which will result a huge gap with the client unless you assign your client as a product owner, which is hard to apply and sustain unless you work as an outsource service provider.

Working on waterfall may sound better, but we would all agree that a waterfall will dramatically increase the vendor cost especially when you approach the final delivery and the client starts to spot the differences between what he imagined and what you have developed and what was originally scoped.

Such experience can successfully be controlled if you set a firm presales analysis, requirements gathering process and a powerful change management processe to prevent scope creeps and gaps.

Having a hybrid model doesn't sound like a solution, otherwise it would have been adopted and gotten a new name as an official methodology by global project management institutes. Taking some of both to make a hybrid model will certainly cause a death to your project when you get stuck between maintaining your iterative delivery, budget and your client expectations.

In my opinion, a waterfall will be a better approach when dealing with projects with external clients, but you have to be careful and take the extra cost in your risk analysis prior to contracting and make sure of having a clear scope and change management processe.

An Agile would be best to use in internal projects or more likely products (such as mobile apps and e-commerce websites).

In short, make the right choice by setting your expected destination before you set your journey in any project.