You see the term ‘Hybrid Project Management’ around a lot at the moment. It typically refers to a combination of ‘Waterfall’ and ‘Agile’ but in my view this is just perpetuating a misleading myth.
Projects (and in this I include programmes and portfolios) have always come in an enormously diverse range of shapes, sizes and levels of complexity.
In the beginning there was just project management. The terms waterfall and agile didn’t exist; methodologies didn’t exist; the concept of projects and programmes as different things didn’t exist; in fact, the whole idea of splitting the discipline into artificial, mutually exclusive buckets didn’t exist. Project Managers just looked at the problem and managed it in the most appropriate way.
What went wrong?
The discipline of project management is the victim of its own success. It grew rapidly in popularity and diversity (not least because of a whole new class of projects – digital) and as the discipline grew and grew, the natural human reaction was to say “We need to break this down into more manageable parts”. Thus, we had to split projects into projects and programmes, and approaches into Waterfall and Agile (to name but four of the artificial, mutually exclusive buckets).
What we’ve seen happen is people trying to limit themselves to one bucket of tools and techniques “I’m an Agile project manager and all my projects will be managed using sprints and scrum” or “I’m in construction, Agile doesn’t apply to me” – and it doesn’t work.
The response to this awakening that narrow views don’t work is now to combine two narrow views (Waterfall and Agile) to create a hybrid. Completely crazy!
Imagine we were to decide that there are too many colours in the spectrum so we’ll just use the opposite ends – red and blue. We discover that our palette is incapable of depicting the real world. Is the answer to just mix red and blue into a mush of reddy-blues and bluey-reds? Of course not – the answer is that we must rediscover the spectrum and accept that the real world is full of subtle tones and shades.
So don’t replace your glasses that have one red waterfall lens and one blue agile lens with ones that have ‘hybrid blue/red’ lenses. Take the glasses off and see the world in all its glorious technicolour. Manage every project with the right combination of all the colours of the spectrum because that’s what’s needed to succeed.
Adrian Dooley is the lead author of the Praxis Framework™.
