12 Practical Tips to Effective Hybrid Execution

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Agile  

Coke or Pepsi?

Nintendo or Xbox?

Sammy Hagar or David Lee Roth?

Agile or waterfall?

In the 2024 PMI Pulse of the Profession® report, one of the three topics covered pertains to the age-old argument of agile versus predictive (aka waterfall) delivery frameworks.

The waterfall purists typically crave structure, with a clear understanding of scope, schedule and budget before commitment and adherence to scope, schedule and budget through delivery.

The agile purists typically crave nimbleness, with rolling waves of smaller logical work groupings and more frequent delivery. I’ve seen discussions on the topic devolve into shouting matches as to which methodology is the “right” one.

In my experience, project managers generally prefer waterfall while engineers prefer agile. PMI has developed the Disciplined Agile® framework, which sandwiches three hybrid levels between the waterfall and agile anchors.

While I think some of my agile purist friends might take exception to the Disciplined Agile® name (as if agile is an undisciplined framework), the way of working spectrum is a reasonable split-the-wickets acknowledgement that there can be peaceful coexistence between agile and waterfall.

Now I’ve been doing this stuff for four decades, and have seen projects from just about every vantage point performing just about every role …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.