Hybrid Project Management: Why to rely in a non-binary approach to a face a continuous changing world

Introduction

Although been around since 2001, the Agile approach is gaining, day by day, a higher number of adopters in the organizations, in several different areas. Nevertheless, as it happens with all the buzzwords and trends in management, we need to clarify some concepts to obtain the maximum of what the Agile concepts may offer.

The Agile is exerting a strong pressure in the traditional Project Management methodologies and concepts. And that is very good. New business scenarios, pushed to be each time more disruptive and faster are jeopardizing the well-established "waterfall" model of project management. In fact, it has been happening in the last ten years or more, but it gained a lot of strength in the last two years, with the COVID-19 crise that forced companies to get out of their status-quo and embrace the inevitable changes that the world brought to our lives.

The world is not Binary. Nor Projects

World is getting complex. Changing our paradigm from VUCA to BANI is the clearest demonstration of it. Managing the chaos in the last years is not something easy. It pushed us to review well established concepts that all of us had in our minds and we were used to cope with. The high-level of connectivity and the speed of information made the chain consequences of an event happening in China, for example, much more impacting the other side of the world, in much less time that it would have happened in ten, twenty years ago

As everything around us, project management needs to respond to this new reality. And, in an ever-changing world, we have no time to discuss and defend an unique methodology or approach, as silver bullet to save our businesses. There is no single answer or approach to sort out new problems. We need to take the best out of what we already know and aggregate new concepts, as they are presented to us. Agile, by itself, is not the only answer and does not give us all what is needed to survive.

Many people defend that we must abandon completely what we have been doing in project management and embrace a fully new set of knowledge to deal with what is coming, as if the human knowledge is something disposable. The battles between Agile practitioners and Project Managers around what is better is causing both approaches to fail and, the victim of it are the teams and, as the last consequence, the project and its results.

As a motto, we must not defend one methodology as an ideology. Methodologies and approaches exist to help us to achieve a result. We must be passionate to achieve a given result, it does not matter if we are using Agile, traditional approaches or a mix of them.

Project Management is not Waterfall

First common misleading concept is that traditional project management is limited to, and only to, waterfall approaches. That is not true and, if you get examples from the software industry, we can conclude that the industry is applying iterative approaches since the 90's: The RUP (Rational Unified Process) is a clear example: It started to introduce partial deliveries since then. Partial deliveries are being around for a while even in the PMBoK, before RUP. It is not something new and revolutionary. As all approaches, it has been improved with the years and achieved a very good level of maturity in Agile. But, stating that project managers do not know or are not suitable to do it is a misleading concept.

Waterfall is a tool in the traditional project management that still have its value: In a predictive environment with clear goals and structure (like building a car, a bridge or a building) this is a very common and useful approach.

Project Management is something broader than waterfall. It is a set of tools and techniques that goes beyond the execution and are very helpful to support other areas of a projects, like budget, stakeholders and procurement. But, as the Agile approaches, it is not a silver bullet and should not be applied "as it is". One size fit all is a concept that does not work anymore. Manage a new airplane needs to combine the strictly of a traditional approach and the flexibility of the Agile mindset. The budget management, that needs to be very formal and bureaucratic cannot slow down the development of new technologies to be applied the modern navigation systems, for example.

Agile is not Scrum

In the same line of thinking, Agile is not Scrum. Agile is an idea: It relies on the Agile Manifesto, disclosed in 2001, starting in the software industry, that was struggling to deal with the rigidity of the traditional project management approaches that defended the idea of a high-level of documentation, just for the sake of it.

Scrum is a tool in the myriad of other tools and techniques available in the Agile world. By the way, this is an excellent example that Agile relies on strict defined process, contrary to what many of Agile practitioners’ advocate: Its objective is to allow the teams to work in a more flexible, clear and objective way, instead of following up a process that can slowdown the development and block creative concepts. It is a tool that is also around for a while and found its place in Agile teams.

However, if you are not willing to really stick to the Agile manifesto, you cannot say you are Agile. And, by the way, it is not the end of the world. Being Agile is not for everyone and, honestly, I do not see its full applicability as a reality in many places.

The same applies to Kanban: It is not because you are using a Kanban board in your project, you are Agile. Kanban is another old concept, that is being applied in quality management and continuous improvement for a long time. The original concept dates from the 40's and it was improved during the decades, being part of important changes in the industry, since its implementation in large scale by Toyota in the 50`s.

Agile is not revolutionary: It is a set of great ideas that improved with the time, merged with new concepts introduced by the chaotic new world we live in and something that we, as humans, must never forget: Common Sense

What is Project Management?

In its book "Effective Project Management - Traditional, Agile, Extreme and Hybrid" (Wiley, 2019), Robert K. Wysocki gave what is, in my opinion, the best definition for project management I ever read:

"Project Management is an organized common-sense approach that utilizes the appropriate client involvement in order to meet the sponsor needs and deliver the expected incremental business value".

It is all here: Organization, involvement, business value and, on top of all this, common-sense. Before the traditional PMBoK definition, this is what synthetizes project management: Without collaboration, organization and a purpose (business value), there is no reason to have a project. This is where many critics attack the traditional project management approaches - and they are right: Having control gates and documents just to control the control is something that makes no sense, add unnecessary overhead and consumes the team that could be applying its time in delivering value to the client.

Evolving is part of life and although we, as human beings, are naturally averse to changes, it is required to keep our existence in this planet. Which means that the project management traditional structure must respond to these changes

Adapting to Survive

As we observed, especially from 2020 on - with the COVID-19 crisis - is that the world will tolerate each time less the radicality: There is no single answer, no single solution, no clear path. World is evolving and it is not clear to anyone what is next. How many new variants of COVID the world will still see, before we state that we can clearly understand how to stop - and, most important: are we going to be able to stop it?

Traditional project management is not the answer for new projects. Nor Agile. Unless you work in a company that builds the same kind of product for decades, without any changes on it (and I believe this will be a very rare scenario in the coming years) or you deal with new problems every single day (which is also rare) you will need to be flexible. Agile approach will not always answer to what you need, neither the traditional approaches. Instead of it, you will need to mix the best of two worlds and create your own version of the best approach. And you will need to keep your eyes and ears opened because it will change too.  

It is silly to think that tools created and used for the last 20 years became useless, from one day to another. As it is silly to think that a new idea will sort out all the problems from one day to another. Accumulated knowledge with the proper adaption is key in the constant changing world we live

I advocate we need a hybrid, flexible and open model of project management. Giving the teams the flexibility and visibility of Scrum and Kanban, the management power of project plans and schedules and the organization the spirit of the Agile Manifesto. It is up to you, as project manager and Agile practitioner to define how. And there is no clear formula for that. The secret, on my point of view is the common-sense: Each project is a unique endeavor (as stated by PMBoK). And, if each project is a unique endeavor with unique results, why should I restrict my vision to an exclusive set of techniques?

You do not need to be full Agile. And it is OK!

Being full agile, for many people, is eliminating all the old-style management techniques and replacing them by Agile tools. The problem is that, many Agile tools were not meant to be used in some contexts. As classical approaches will not fit in some modern problems we face nowadays.

When I see the current hurry of some organizations to "be-Agile", transforming everything they see in an Agile initiative, I remind about the buzz that the management saw in the 90's, with the reengineering boom: It did not matter if it was necessary to your organization or not: It was a need to have a group of people (or a consulting firm - that sold their services for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to show to the world you were "cool" or aligned with the market trends. And, also, to take the opportunity to downsize (taking the main idea out of its context), sometimes unnecessarily. In the end of the day, many companies throwed millions of dollars and working hours into the bin, simply because could not sustain the level of commitment it required - and lots of it had to do with culture.

The same is happening with Agile: Many consulting companies and gurus are stating that it is the main solution to expedite the time to market and innovation of projects. And it is not necessarily true: Agile does not necessarily means quicker and innovative. It means a new way of doing things, focusing on collaboration and business value delivery. Being quicker or innovative will not always happen: Agile projects also struggles with market restrictions, crisis, constraints and reprioritization. The idea is to improve the way the project team reacts to that, without losing sight of the business value of the project. 

Sometimes you will need to have an additional management and reporting layer to ensure the proper follow-up of a project. Regulatory agencies, government demands, budget constraints, capacity management will always need reports and close monitoring. However, we can do it using automated tools instead of traditional manual gathered data and fancy MS-Excel spreadsheets. Simplicity to tackle complex problems must be in the core of the new ways of work. Tackling with several different stakeholders, spread around different parts of the world, playing different roles and having different views of what needs to be done is also a challenge for Agile practitioners: But It is a common challenge for project managers. Using the knowledge from people that are facing the same issues for a long time has a huge value in today`s world

 So, should I go full Agile or full Projectized

You should adapt. Or, rephrasing, you MUST adapt. As line manager, project manager or Agile practitioner, you need to look around you and stick to any tool or technique that will help you to succeed. You need to exchange with your colleagues - independently of their "ideological view". The solution for an ever-changing world is to have different ways to tackle the problems, with inputs from several different experiences and views, looking for a consensus on how to get your things done!

By the way, having an ideological view in project management approaches nowadays is a terrible and restrictive idea: Open your mind. Give a chance to the new. And don't repeal what is classic: Sometimes, if you push the same buttons in a different order, you will achieve new and unexpected results. And, in the end of the day what we need, more than ever, is to achieve results.