Can You Make a Hybrid Approach Work for Your Project? (Part 2)

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, tried to balance her team’s request to use an agile approach with the realities of the organization back in Part 1. The team wanted to try an agile approach now that it completed its original project.

However, the new project had a lot more uncertainty. In fact, when the project was supposed to start, Paul, the product manager, hadn’t finished his product requirements document (PRD). How could they manage uncertainty when Paul had trouble defining what he wanted? Franny agreed that an agile approach would work to help reduce uncertainty. The team could use an agile approach to help Paul understand what he wanted and when.

Use an Agile Approach to Feature Planning
Franny decided to see if Paul would use an agile approach to the features and the planning for the requirements. She sat down with Paul and said, “How much more time do you need to do to finish the PRD?”

Paul said, “It’ll take me at least couple of weeks to finish it.”

“How about if we help you as a team?” Franny asked. “Who knows, you might not even need all of it.”

“That would great, as long as you don’t just start deleting sections.”

“Only if we need to!” Franny said and smiled.

Franny introduced the idea of rolling wave roadmaps to Paul and the team.

Then, she said, &…

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