If you take comfort in the thought that nobody’s perfect, you might not want to know that a 100% project completion win rate is not only possible, but something around 2.5% of companies have already achieved. But if you, on the other hand, take comfort in knowing what’s possible so that you can achieve it yourself, you’re already asking: How are they doing that?
Hybrid project management is one of the ways. Defined as an approach that seeks to combine attributes of other known project management methodologies (e.g., Scrum), hybrid project management is favored by organizations that tend to run very robust projects, or have projects with lots of ‘moving parts’ to keep track of. It facilitates a holistic perspective whereby the larger organization’s goals can be easily kept in view and not obscured by pressing daily priorities. How else can hybrid PM processes and ways of thinking help your teams?
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Greater flexibility
Hybrid project management lets a project manager combine the most powerful aspects of other PM approaches like waterfall, agile, and Scrum, all without necessarily inducing their respective drawbacks into the process. As far as what aspects you might want to import from each methodology, and which project phases you’ll choose to hybridize, the best part of hybrid PM is that those questions are largely left up to you. The correct answers are, simply put, the ones that work the best for your particular team or projects.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose your teams respond well to the strong, structured initial project planning phases that are characteristic of the waterfall style, but don’t continue to do well with waterfall after development commences. That lets you know that initial project planning and groundwork phases should likely stay done according to the waterfall approach. Additionally, if your teams happen to struggle with scope creep, using waterfall during the planning phases can help establish a guardrail. By mandating that project requirements be aligned and agreed to prior to development, you can save a lot of time and stress later.
As the Project Management Institute memorably clarifies, “If there is potential misunderstanding between the customer and contractor on the work scope, the processes that will be applied, the deliverables and milestones of the project, then clarification of these issues once the project is underway, even if achieved ‘peacefully’ and without antagonizing the customer, will often result in scope creep.” Using the hybrid PM style in this way, it becomes possible to fend off scope creep while preserving mission-critical relationships with both internal and external customers.
[RELATED: DataOps can bring certainty to uncertain data.]
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Easier experimentation
It’s important to note that within a hybrid project management model you’re not married to waterfall as a starting point (or at any other time); you can, and should, incorporate other PM doctrines, as and when you note that they’ll do the most good for teams. Of course, now there are questions: Which doctrines? When to implement them? Maybe you only have experience in agile; can you still implement a hybrid model? Hybrid project management is also an excellent tool to discover those and many more answers