The first two chapters of this book have introduced and defined agile hybrids, provided some examples, and given you a framework to assess where your organization and its projects may be on a continuum between full plan-driven project management and very agile project management. This chapter will give you ideas on how to actually build a hybrid agile methodology for your organization. It is important to know from the start that this will be an iterative journey, much like the projects that the methodology is used to deliver. Assume that you will start and build an approach, learn from its application, and continuously refine it – same as what is done in an agile project.
This chapter will discuss building a hybrid methodology by using examples from some scenarios that I’ve personally led or participated in. In these examples, the organization had an existing project management methodology, whether phase-based, plan-driven, or even a nascent attempt at agile. As each organization evolved and started to become interested in using agile practices in its project delivery, the methodology evolved to become a hybrid, or in some cases an umbrella that enabled use of both plan-driven and agile practices within the same program.
Developing and improving a hybrid agile project management methodology is a journey – an iterative process. Same as with agile projects – learn from use, iterate, and improve.
What Do You Know?
The first two chapters have shown you how to assess your organization and determine what you know about its culture, structure, and the types of projects typically run within your organization. This self-knowledge about your organization is critical to designing a hybrid agile methodology that is suited to your organization and its projects. Using the tools and examples introduced in Chapters 1 and 2, it is important for you and your team, stakeholders and sponsors, other influential people in the organization, to take the time to assess the organization and confirm where you are and who you are. Forming a solid foundational consensus of the organization and its project management needs is critical to developing the first version of your hybrid agile methodology.
In this case, “what do you know?” is intended to get you thinking about these cultural and process elements already in place. The following examples will demonstrate what I mean by this and hopefully give you some patterns and ideas on how you can have these conversations yourself within your organization.
Example – Technology Consulting Firm
In 2012 I joined a technology consulting firm as a principal consultant and project management competency lead. The firm had three lines of business: ecommerce, something called CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote ), and a Salesforce implementation practice. When asked to update the project management and proposal estimating and development processes, I assessed the organization’s culture and the types of projects we typically delivered. Given aspects of the systems we were usually implementing and the customers we worked with, it was clear we needed to evolve from the highly plan-driven, phase-based project management approach that was in place. This change would help us be a more nimble delivery organization and accelerate our growth, especially in our ecommerce business where we had developed a revolutionary new software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that could be implemented very rapidly. We knew a couple of key things: our customers were beginning to adopt agile practices, and we needed to be able to ramp up our projects quickly and begin delivery without an extended planning phase.
Example – Biopharma Company
At the biopharmaceutical company where I was one of several IT project managers, the gradual adoption of agile after it was used to deliver a major ecommerce replatforming was gaining traction. Our IT leadership and a new senior director over marketing and IT were increasingly interested in adopting and leveraging agile practices.
However, we all knew the rest of the organization was just beginning to embrace more familiar phase-based, plan-driven project management. We knew that a sudden pivot to agile would have been very jarring and confusing – it would need to be socialized and introduced as complementary to the existing project management processes.
Example – State Investment Board
A couple of years prior to writing this book, I did some consulting work for a state investment board. This organization manages the investments behind my state’s retirement system. This organization wanted to leverage more agile practices in the development and delivery of its IT systems.
Early in the process, I spent time working with the person advocating for agile. It is important to keep in mind that investing, particularly when you are responsible for the retirement funds of an entire state workforce, is a historically risk-averse culture. The sponsor knew that this aversion to risk permeated the organizational culture. He also knew that most of the people there had spent their career using waterfall project management practices, and so relating agile practices back to their corollary in waterfall practices would help make things more relatable.
It also helped us as we talked with influential sponsors and stakeholders to tell them that while agile adoption was not mandatory, understanding where they should focus their energy, where they could get the most value, and where they would impede the agile adoption if they did not adopt certain practices were all important factors for them to understand.
Example – Marketing Software Company
In 2017, I was working as vice president of software development for a cloud ecommerce company. As part of my job, I spent time talking to other leaders of development at similar companies to learn more about their practices and what was working for them. One of these leaders (Herry) shared how when he first joined his organization, he learned that they had a very slow organizational culture with three big software teams and an old code base. His charge was to speed up and scale up the development process.
His assessment helped him determine how to change the project management methodology to a hybrid of Lean and Kanban, with a focus on attaining flow. This leader also recognized that he needed to change the culture in team leadership and accountability. For this hybrid methodology to work, it was important to instill a culture of shared accountability for the completion and delivery of quality software, where everyone owned quality – not just the QA team.
What Do You Have?
The project management body of knowledge, or PMBOK, often refers to what are called “process assets.” “Process assets” is just a fancy name for tools, processes, and templates that your organization already has in place. These process assets may be existing project management processes, tools, and templates, or they may be other business process tools and templates.
Depending on your organization and its existing maturity in project management, there may be process assets in place that have been used successfully and can be adapted or serve as foundations for an evolving agile hybrid methodology. It is not necessary to “reinvent the wheel” if any of these elements are working, are familiar to others in the organization, and if their use has been adopted widely throughout the organization.
Example – The Biopharma Corporation
The biopharma had a set of existing project management templates that were widely used, fine-tuned, and familiar to many people in the organization from their use on five years of previous projects. As our hybrid agile methodology evolved, these templates were adapted to reflect the increased use of agile practices. Where appropriate, new templates were created to capture artifacts such as user stories. Familiar aspects of the template were retained, while new elements to reflect agile practices and artifacts were added or created.
A good example is the document used for project request and initiation. Rather than create a new document to initiate projects that were flagged as likely to be run using agile practices, we retained the existing project charter. Certain elements of the charter were tweaked to reflect that fewer elements of the project were known or identified at this early stage and would be refined as the project moved forward.
Another example is the introduction of a release plan template. The existing phase-based methodology had a document intended for use in documenting the narrative of the project plan. This document was augmented with a release plan template. It showed how deliverables would initially be slotted within sprints in the release plan. It also noted specifically that it was a dynamic document that would be updated after each release.
Example – Technical Consulting Firm
The consulting firm had process assets from its first attempt at creating its own branded approach to project delivery. (For some reason, consulting firms that use projects to deliver value to clients feel compelled to create their own branded approach to project management.) I determined that some of these could be adapted to a hybrid agile methodology.
For example, the template used to create proposals also served a number of project initiation and definition purposes. The proposal also ultimately served as the document in which the final detailed project plan was conveyed. When the revised proposal template was combined with the revised estimating process and templates that used the projected duration of the project along with the planned size of the team, it was fairly easy to create a hybrid proposal and planning template to add to the existing plan-driven process assets.
Example – Marketing Software Company
Herry, the head of development at the marketing software company, had a solid quality assurance team in place – they had existing testing practices and tools, and a strong leader. The problem was that this team was also a bottleneck due to the way the overall organization operated. Leveraging the existing process assets of QA combined with the hybrid of Lean and Kanban helped Herry eliminate QA as a bottleneck and instead leverage QA as an asset. Herry also created a culture of shared responsibility for quality and the QA process baked into the new hybrid project management methodology.
What Do You Need?
The question “what do you need” is driven by the answers to some of the other questions asked in this chapter as well as many other factors. It comes down to what kind of projects you deliver and expect to deliver with the hybrid approach. Taking the time to assess the current state of project management may very well reveal that there are missing processes or templates that are needed to be effective independent of creating and implementing a hybrid agile methodology.
This assessment could be an opportunity to not only work on developing your hybrid but also to shore up gaps and deficiencies in your existing (and perhaps successful) project management methodology. Remember, you are not interested in doing away with anything that has been successful for the organization. You are interested in creating an additional approach to project management that will be beneficial to the organization and introduce needed agility.
Although some agile purists may advocate doing away with the essential elements of traditional project management, the experienced and pragmatic practitioner finds that these elements are still present in agile, although applied in different ways and at different points and cadences throughout a project life cycle. As you assess and answer the question “what do you need,” consider elements such as stakeholder communications, risk management, project initiation, charters, procurement processes, and other traditional project management artifacts. You will need some form of these in your hybrid approach, or you may simply adapt and adopt them with the modifications necessary to enable desired agility and flexibility within project delivery.
Example – Technical Consulting Firm
The technical consulting firm needed a defined and disciplined agile process that would incorporate the realities of consulting work while retaining the flexibility of agile delivery. By this I mean that clients wanted a cost and duration estimate prior to signing a statement of work document – a reasonable expectation. They also wanted to be “agile” – essentially, they wanted things both ways. Our estimating and statement of work documents became the instruments for documenting and communicating our agile practices to the client while also providing a vehicle for the client and our firm to negotiate and manage agile change.
Example – Biopharma Corporation
The head of IT at the biopharma had a clear vision in mind for what was needed as a hybrid methodology. His exact words were “lightweight, rapid, managed.” This need was defined by an interest in ensuring that waterfall and agile project management did not become, or become perceived as, too process-heavy. He also wanted to convey that projects would move through the project management process and life cycle rapidly while being appropriately managed.
Example – A Technical College
When I became the CIO of a large midwestern technical college, I encountered a project management process that was extremely and unnecessarily complex – so much so that people in the college did everything they could to circumvent the process. It was clear to me that a much simpler approach to assessing and initiating projects that stressed conversations and partnership versus process and documentation was needed. I sensed that the people and culture of the college would respond much better to an approach that clearly valued relationships and collaboration over process and detailed initiation paperwork.
Who Do You Need?
The question “who do you need” is driven by your organizational culture. You will need a strong sponsor for this endeavor. As stated earlier, this is true of any organizational change, but perhaps even more so with a new approach to project management. You will also need the buy-in of influential people in the organization, especially those who will use or interact with your evolving hybrid agile project methodology. The people who will be most affected by changes to project management methodology should be involved and of course bought into the process of developing and implementing a hybrid agile approach to project management.
Example – Biopharma Company
Kari had joined the biopharma as the senior director overseeing marketing and IT. She had previously been a vice president at a successful technical consulting firm where she used hybrid agile practices to grow the business and deliver widely recognized successful projects. Coming into the biopharma, her interest and strong sponsorship for developing and adopting hybrid agile practices was not only critical to adoption, it helped to add momentum to some grassroots work that had already been started.
The grassroots work to developing more agile practices and weaving them into the traditional project management approach was crucial to the success of the hybrid agile approach. Because influential managers and practitioners were already on board, this combined momentum helped to accelerate the development and adoption.
Example – Technical Consulting Firm
The founder and CEO of the consulting firm was keenly interested in evolving project management practices to reflect the interests of our clients in using more agile approaches to project delivery. The more we worked with clients interested in rapid adoption of our new ecommerce system, the clearer it became that the older plan-driven approach needed to evolve to a hybrid approach with many elements of agile as core to the new methodology.
The CEO’s support was critical, but equally critical was the buy-in from other principal consultants as well as the business development team. The principal consultants, architects, project managers, and business development staff were the people who would need to estimate, plan, sell, and ultimately deliver using this new hybrid approach. Without their support, this effort would have gone nowhere.
Where Do You Start?
Implementing change in any organization for any reason can be a daunting prospect. If an organization has been using a project management methodology with some success (or without success but with familiarity) for a long time, pushing for change will encounter resistance. We will discuss agile implementation in more detail later in this book. For now, it is important to know that two important places to start in this endeavor are evangelism and training.
Evangelism – Getting a group of influential people to believe and to start socializing the change and the need for change is important to creating awareness of the need to change. Then they can start getting people thinking and talking about adopting and adapting new project management methods. Evangelism of the need to change and of the new way for doing things is not unique to adopting new project management practices; this is true about any important organizational change.
The other critical place to start is with a common basis in training. Later in this book, we talk about adopting agile project management practices, and we note that a common basis in training is critical to successful adoption. When starting your hybrid agile methodology, it is important that you start thinking about how you will develop and deliver the training. You are likely to be developing something that is unique to your organization and your needs, so off-the-shelf training may not exist. An experienced consultant may be able to help you outline ideas for your hybrid methodology as well as how to develop and deliver the training needed.
Example – Financial Insurance Company
I did some work for an insurance company that specializes in mortgage loan insurance. This organization wanted to ensure that their people who have a more casual relationship with project management understood both waterfall and agile project management methods as well as how these could be blended and used in a hybrid approach. The mortgage insurance company started by creating a common basis in training for a cohort of team leads whose main jobs did not always involve project management, but who needed to have an awareness of project management to be effective leaders and to occasionally manage small projects themselves.
Building from this initial awareness, the company used its extensive training capabilities to guide people to additional project management training appropriate to their roles and to their interests in learning more about project management, whether agile or plan-driven.
Example – Biopharma
At the biopharma company, we began to evangelize the use of agile alongside of, mixed with, or in place of the existing plan-driven practices. This evangelism was supported because a cohort of us had been successful with a hybrid agile project delivery and wanted to ensure others knew how we had done this and how it could be repeated on future projects. Our new senior director was an advocate of hybrid agile herself and had also brought along people she had worked with elsewhere to advocate for more agile approaches to delivering projects.
I was assigned to find or create the training programs for IT and software development that emphasized iterative development as well as emerging agile practices. IT and marketing management were bought into the idea of establishing this common basis in training to help ensure projects using hybrid methodologies would be more successful because the team members and sponsors and functional managers would all be working from the same basis in training. We ended up writing some of our own training (which subsequently became the foundation of an agile course I taught at the University of Wisconsin for nine years) as well as bringing in some local and national talent to provide training on specific agile topics.
What Next?
Chapter 3 has been focused on helping you think about building a hybrid agile approach to project management. We’ve helped you assess your organization thinking about what you know about your culture, people, and projects. We’ve helped you determine how to assess what you already have that will help you get started. We’ve looked at what you will need and whose support you will need in order to be successful, and we’ve talked about ways to get started.
The title of this book is Succeeding with Agile Hybrids, and the keyword here is “agile.” For this reason, the second part of this book will focus on learning agile. “Agile” is the foundation for hybrid agile approaches to project management as espoused in the book. Chapter 4 will discuss the history of agile, examining its origins and how it evolved over decades to become the popular and widely used set of methodologies today.
Chapters 5 through 9 will discuss the core elements of agile methodologies, teams, agile leaders, and the role of agile coaches. Chapters 10, 11, and 12 will explore more advanced topics in agile such as design thinking, the role of the executive leader, and some approaches to scaling agile. Taken as a foundational discussion of how to be successful with hybrid agile methodologies combined with the foundation in good agile practices, you will be well positioned to lead in your organization as hybrid agile evangelist and practitioner.