What the Heck is Hybrid, Anyway?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

The more observant of you will have noticed that I tend to write a number of articles on each monthly ProjectManagement.com theme, so as I write this one for May’s hybrid PM topic, I’m slightly nervous that I’m painting myself into a corner. If I’m not careful, I’m going to spend an article shooting down the concept of hybrid and then have to write some more pieces about it.

I’ll try not to do that, but I think it’s an example of one of the challenges we face in project management when we talk about hybrid. For many of us, we aren’t exactly sure what it means—or perhaps more accurately, we all think it means something different (sometimes good, sometimes bad).

You’ll likely find consensus that “hybrid” generally means a project execution approach that combines elements of agile and elements of traditional, waterfall project management. There are even some formal models that have been published that offer a single methodology with agile and waterfall elements, but there isn’t a single model that dominates.

Further, many organizations will develop their own hybrid models simply by integrating elements of whichever approach is new to them into their existing project execution approach (generally that means adding agile elements to a waterfall methodology, but not always). It’s easy to see …

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