Can You Make a Hybrid Approach Work for Your Project? (Part 1)

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile  

Franny, a project manager, felt torn between what her team wanted and how the organization worked. The project team wanted to use an agile approach. It was excited about limiting its work in progress (WIP), seeing finished work quickly and getting feedback on what it completed.

However, Paul, the product manager, insisted on completing the entire product requirements document (PRD) before the project started. Paul explained in all seriousness that if the team wanted to change anything, it needed to follow a change request process.

Franny thought Paul was a good guy. She recognized he was under a ton of pressure from his management. However, Paul was only available about once a week to review any questions from the team or offer feedback on the team’s decisions—and any requested changes. Franny didn’t see how the team could adopt an agile approach if Paul wasn’t available.

The deployment team actually posed a larger problem. The organization had one centralized deployment team. Deployment insisted on reviewing all the code and test changes before releasing any change to staging, never mind production. That meant that the deployment team was always backed up with other teams’ requests.

The average time for the deployment team to release any team’s “finished” work to staging was about three weeks. Because deployment took …

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