Projects are Not Black and White: The Bimodal Buzz Ignores Reality

Kevin Aguanno is the agile practice lead for Procept Associates Ltd., one of PMI’s first Registered Education Providers, specializing in training and project and programme strategy consulting. Author of over 30 books, audiobooks and DVDs on project management topics, he teaches agile methods at several universities and at conferences around the world. He spends most of his time helping large, complex organizations integrate agile project management methods into their governance frameworks.

  Agile   Governance   Strategy  

Gartner Group, a well-known think tank of IT experts introduced a new term into the project management lexicon in the fall of 2014. At its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2014--held in October in the United States and November in Spain--Dr. Marcus Blosch, Gartner’s VP of Research, delivered a presentation titled “Taming the Digital Dragon” in which he proposed that IT organizations need to have at least two different project methodologies: a traditional (a.k.a. “waterfall”) approach focused on efficiency, reliability, predictability, scalability, accuracy and safety; and a non-sequential approach focused on experimentation, innovation, agility and speed (a.k.a. “agile”).

Gartner refers to these two approaches as Mode 1 (waterfall) and Mode 2 (agile). Because of the two modes, Dr. Blosch called this view of how IT organizations should approach their projects as “Bimodal IT.” Gartner’s IT Glossary says bimodal IT “refers to having two modes if IT, each designed to develop and deliver information- and technology-intensive services in its own way.” Another Gartner analyst, Tom McCall, refers to these two modes as “a rigorous, detail-focused half and a creative and curious half.” (“How to Innovate with Bimodal IT”, Feb. 18, 2015.)

The concept of a bimodal approach to IT projects has caught …

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