Joining the dots and
becoming more efficient [1]
SECOND EDITION
By Shikha Saka
Dallas, Texas, USA
Abstract
As the proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention, it has brought us from traditional project management methodologies to the newer project management methodologies.
From the extremities of the pure waterfall and pure Agile lies the hybrid approach. The beauty of the hybrid approach comes from deriving from the best of both worlds. Most of the practitioners understand best practices and apply lessons learned. Then why is there still a need for innovations in the hybrid approach?
Innovations are necessary to help keep in line with business objectives and help deliver the project to the market. The ability to tailor and add nuances that suit your company is one of the keys to delivering high value from a project management office.
While allowing well-organized teams to deliver value, reviewing, and applying the 30-60-90-day rule to project impact, performing quarterly value delivery reviews, performing risk management, and applying lessons learned will be some of the tweaks that will help to hit the home run. They will help to address the increased uncertainty and help to improve velocity and delivery across projects.
The paper aims to provide you with an understanding of what tailored processes have been successful and what can be the avoidable pitfalls.
Keywords: traditional project management, agile, scrum, project management, hybrid methodologies, innovation, customer focus, project impact
Introduction
Over the years, with innovation and newer technologies, has arisen the need for better tools and frameworks. This is no different for the Project Management world. A lot of the practitioners are well versed in the traditional waterfall methodology. The popularity of the Agile framework has steadily increased and has encouraged numerous practitioners to adopt those fundamentals. This is combined with the fact that the market and customer needs are evolving and changing quickly. The ability to react quickly to those changes is one of the keys to being successful. The traditional methodology reacts to change but at a huge cost as the resources have already been used to develop a solution. Any change in the requirements meaning that little or some part of the work can only be salvaged. So, what next? Another project management technique?
The answer lies not necessarily in finding new techniques but in using the best existing known techniques to solve the project problems. A hybrid approach that combines the best of both worlds is one such approach that is picking up pace. Based on a published report, 39% of the surveyed companies use hybrid project management approaches (thedigitalprojectmanager, 2021) (Hub Staff, 2021).
Considering changing customer requirements, and market demand the benefits of using a hybrid methodology can be viewed better as compared to using a single methodology.
Project Management Techniques
Waterfall Approach
An overview of the project management for waterfall methodology. It uses phases for the execution of the project. The waterfall model is a breakdown of project activities into linear sequential phases, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one and corresponds to a specialization of tasks.
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Editor’s note: Second Editions are previously published papers that have continued relevance in today’s project management world, or which were originally published in conference proceedings or in a language other than English. Original publication acknowledged; authors retain copyright. This paper was originally presented at the 14th UT Dallas PM Symposium in May 2022. It is republished here with the permission of the authors and conference organizers.
How to cite this paper: Saka, S. (2022). Hybrid PM innovations: Joining the dots and becoming more efficient; presented at the 14th University of Texas at Dallas Project Management Symposium in Richardson, TX, USA in May 2022; republished in the PM World Journal, Vol. XI, Issue IX, September. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/pmwj121-Sep2022-Saka-hybrid-PM-innovations-joining-the-dots.pdf
About the Author
Shikha Saka
Texas, USA
Shikha Saka is an accomplished IT project management practitioner with expertise in the areas of IT management in Agile, waterfall, and hybrid methodologies, Product roadmap planning, resource management, and delivery. She has experience in Real Estate, Airlines, logistics sector and has helped with enterprise-wide IT migrations, development and application management, application operations and maintenance, Application support engagements, analytical platform. She has a master’s degree in engineering and is certified PMP, CSM, ACSM, and ITIL.
[1] The views expressed in the paper are of the author’s based on her knowledge and experience.
