Hybrid and proud

It’s official. Hybrid cheerleaders can finally celebrate after years of keeping quiet. A topic on hybrid life cycles is included for the first time in the APM Body of Knowledge (APMBoK). The just-published seventh edition acknowledges that: “Context matters: there is no universally applicable one-size-fits-all life cycle. Hybrid life cycles enable a pragmatic mix of philosophies, typically fusing together elements from predictive and adaptive perspectives to create a new mode or approach.”

They may just be words on a page, but they are symbolic of a big shift in thinking.

“This is a big move for APM,” explains Darren Dalcher, professor in strategic project management at Lancaster University Management School and co-editor of the seventh-edition APMBoK. “It’s about recognising the different possibilities. This is probably the first time that we have been brave enough to do this.”

In reality, project managers have always been pragmatically adapting their approaches to suit a project. “The APMBoK seemed to imply that there was a simple sequential process that starts at the beginning, works in perfect order and gets you to the end. [Now] there is a recognition that life happens and it is never that simple. You don’t know everything in advance, and you need to make changes along the way. This is exactly what hybrid allows us to do,” says Dalcher.

Project managers have always taken a pragmatic approach to getting the job done, diverging from a prescriptive theoretical path when needs demanded. It’s just that they tended to keep quiet about their hybrid tendencies. Well now it’s about standing up and saying: “I’m brave enough to say that this is what I’m doing, and I can actually plan for it better if I can acknowledge it,” urges Dalcher.

On a spectrum

Over the past decade, project managers have benefited from the wave of agile techniques that have leached out of the world of software development, opening up a whole new toolkit from which project managers can pick and choose.

“Hybrid recognises that we have a spectrum between the linear, highly predictive situations we encounter and the more highly adaptive, less well-understood contexts,” says Dalcher. “If we have a very simple context where everything is understood and can be anticipated, hybrid will not be the right approach – the linear perspective will work well. Once we get into a more complex scenario where parts of it are not understood, inevitably you are talking about a mix of approaches. It’s about finding the right mix and balance – there are lots of different flavours of hybrid.”

Stephen Carver, a lecturer in project and programme management at Cranfield University, agrees: “It’s not a war between waterfall and agile – it is a continuum. Some people fought for the view that everything must be one or the other, but most people leading the industry realise that was a sideshow. It was an over-spontaneous response to agile as if it were some sort of a saviour, and now people are taking a far more balanced view.”

It’s time for hybrid to be celebrated. “Bits of my project run on waterfall, some bits on agile, and some bits in the middle I call ‘wagile’,” Carver explains. Trusting your judgement and intuition to adapt your approach is critical to getting the approach right. “[Hybrid] is a state of mind. People are so obsessed with process. It’s a conversation that is naïve and misses the point of why we are here – to get the job done.”

The age of hybrid

“Hybrid is coming; hybrid is here,” says Jim Conroy of Project Objects, a project portfolio management software vendor. “It’s beginning to come out of the closet, so to speak – out of the software room and into proper projects.” Conroy worked on a recent implementation at Danish life insurance company Tryg, which asked him to use an agile methodology that it was initiating not just for software, but also for capital projects and products.

Previously Tryg had only used waterfall, Conroy explains. Now it uses a methodology that borrows agile concepts from the software world and integrates with a sequential waterfall project management approach. Tryg was seeking the benefits that come with agile, such as reduced time implementation and a more iterative validation. According to Conroy, it was also looking for an element of collaboration by getting other constituent interests involved.

“This is one of the first examples [of hybrid] we have seen in the market,” says Conroy, “but most of our clients, including EMI, Nestlé and Max Mara, are typically using a waterfall approach.

“If they are using an agile approach its typically in the back room with the IT department, as opposed to larger capital projects. Some of them may use something like Microsoft SharePoint to communicate internally, then they roll that up – sometimes manually – into a project management work breakdown structure.”

It is not only agile’s capacity to deal with a fast-changing, unpredictable environment that appeals to project managers, but also its reliance on collaboration between teams. “Instead of being in silos, it forces people to communicate between functions and business units, and that frees up a lot of innovative thinking,” says Conroy.

The mess of creativity

Conroy is clear that a waterfall approach is a necessary one: “You can’t not do it. You have a project or idea coming in and you need to assess whether that is a good strategic fit, whether you’ve got the cost for it and the right resources to make it happen. Then you do have to go through a process of saying, ‘We’ve got these deliverables, and tasks and workflows within them that need to get done and validated.’ These are key aspects that you must retain in some way.”

What works, Conroy believes, is using waterfall for the overall project structure, but agile for delivery. Yet there can be a fear around agile for project managers unused to it. “There is an element of loss of control, because you are not managing every single task and deliverable, but instead waiting for the mess of creativity to manifest itself,” says Conroy, who cut his business teeth in Silicon Valley, and saw first hand how agile is more about creativity and “people putting sticky notes on a board”. “There is a psychological element to agile – being part of a team in a room all together, and all the passion that goes with that,” he explains.

It can make some project managers want to run for the hills. But it will be the ones who can open their minds to a new way of doing things who will reap the rewards.