“Change is the law of life. Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” — John F. Kennedy, 1963.
Change is hard on everyone. Even the more adaptable among us have a hard time changing the way they do their things. And that goes double for change in the corporate enterprise, where things move slowly and people expect stability especially when they’ve been doing things the same way for a long time without hearing any complaints.
For those of you thinking that you’re the exception to the rule, just try changing from iOS to Android or vice versa. You’ll be tearing your hair out within an hour! But don’t go toupee shopping just yet, we’re here to help. Innovative enterprises looking to introduce agile methodologies are using creative, hybrid frameworks that mix the old with the new to reduce internal resistance and ease the pain brought about by change.
Hybrid is king
Hybrid approaches are helping to usher in change everywhere around us. Just look at our cars! By 2040, more than half of all new cars will be electric. Electric cars will impact our daily lives in a big way — just imagine, no more gas stations! But a change on that scale requires huge infrastructural investments and a shift in thinking that take time to make. Like we mentioned before, it’s hard to change entrenched ways of doing things.
In the meantime, hybrid cars are popping up on highways and byways across the US and the rest of the world. They represent an easier way for consumers to transition to a new way of driving. By combining an internal combustion engine with an electric one, hybrid cars give their drivers the positive characteristics of both. The gas engine ensures quick and highly available refueling options, while the electric component reduces fuel costs and helps the environment.
In the business world, hybrid agile approaches to project management are making it easier for change-resistant enterprises to introduce flexibility, adaptability and enhanced productivity into their organizations.
Hybrid represents a real opportunity for enterprises to help drive agile adoption across their organization.
Hybrid is a great way to introduce agile
Like we said before, it’s not easy to simply go agile in enterprises that are used to working according to rigid plans. By taking a hybrid, piecemeal approach to agile adoption, enterprises are creating flexible frameworks that add agile components at the tactical level and combine them with more traditional ways on the strategic level. That way, teams get new, agile ways of working while management gets to keep existing processes for strategic planning in place.
That being said, don’t rush into agile. Start slowly with just one team and a scrum master. Make sure that you stop to think which agile approaches are best suited to the project at hand.
Plan it with waterfall, do it with agile
Some popular hybrid agile frameworks use a waterfall project planning approach at first and then move on to iterative, adaptive agile development cycles. This framework speeds up turnaround and boosts productivity while enabling management to put in guidelines to control costs and delivery time. Waterfall at the end ensures that pre-delivery testing and client integration, both of which are critical to keeping customers satisfied, are done according to the traditional approach to guarantee peace of mind.
What’s great about this hybrid framework is that parts of the process that call for a slow pace, like planning and quality control, use waterfall which is much better suited to this than agile. Parts of the process that need more adaptability and productivity, like execution, use agile processes that allow this flexibility.
The downside here is that to work effectively both approaches need to compromise. Waterfall has to reduce expectations of full control and predictability while agile must be able to work with strict deadlines and budgetary controls.
Planview AdaptiveWork provides a powerful combination of solutions that help enterprises build a hybrid agile framework that works for them. Planview AdaptiveWork Go is a simple task management solution that gives teams the freedom to personalize their workflows to suit their own unique way of working. Seamless synching with Planview AdaptiveWork One delivers a streamlined agile framework — projects are planned in Planview AdaptiveWork One and once approved, are sent directly to Planview AdaptiveWork Go for implementation using boards, cards and other tools that increase collaboration and visibility.
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