Is the Hybrid Methodology the Future of Project Management?

David is an experienced project manager, and founder and CEO of Binfire.com, a SaaS project management and collaboration application.

SHARE
Request to reuse this
Add to my favorites
Topics: Agile, Estimating, Scrum, Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)

In the past few years, agile methodologies have become more popular. Until recently, the prevalent view in the project management community was that the growth in acceptance of agile has been at the expense of waterfall. In other words, agile and waterfall are two fundamentally different approaches to project management. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and in different scenarios each is relevant.

A more nuanced approach to agile and waterfall has started gaining traction. Once referred to as “structured agile,” more practitioners are combining both methodologies. This article provides a framework for how ScrumMasters and project managers can work together using hybrid principles.

At a high level, a hybrid project is managed by a project manager using work breakdown structure (WBS). As you can see in the schematic of hybrid project management flow below, the project manager has overall ownership for the project and is supported by ScrumMasters who are responsible for executing each agile sprint. He or she is concerned with the front end of the project flow, such as product requirements, customer feedback and components definition. ScrumMasters are responsible for the back end of project flow, including backlogs, sprints and releases.

Hybrid Project Management Planning (Mostly WBC)
Hybrid Project Management requires a complete project plan when a …

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