There’s No Such Thing as Hybrid Agile!

 

Hybrid Agile?  There ain’t no such animal.  Really.  Agile is not a thing you do.  It’s not a framework or methodology.  Technically, it’s a vision statement and twelve guiding principles that can be applied to multiple project approaches.  Scrumban? Sure.  WaterScrumfall?  It’s out there.  Agile Waterfall?  Let’s talk about that for a bit.

Let’s start with the Agile Manifesto.  Can you value the items on the left more than the items on the right and still be doing Waterfall?  I’ll give you a hint; the answer starts with ‘YES’.  It gets a little more complicated, however, when you take a closer look at the principles behind the manifesto.

If you look at the first tenet, you have to look at the whole thing.  I don’t think that any project approach can claim, ‘Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer…’ without caveats.  In the case of Agile, the caveat is early and continuous delivery of a product that adds value.  Waterfall does not do this very well.

The next tenet brings to mind some of the things I want to discuss regarding uncertainty.  Who really welcomes changing requirements?  Almost everyone wants at least a little certainty in their life.  Waterfall gives the illusion of certainty early in the project, but change later in the project can kill a project.  Agile approaches can cause uncertainty in the business at any point of the project, which can sabotage the adoption of Agile in an organization with little Agile experience.  Work past your organization’s fear of uncertainty, and you will be better able to deal with change, regardless of whether or not you are using Agile.

I would love the next three tenets on any project, regardless of approach.  Engaged business users, trusted and motivated team members, working face-to-face in a supportive environment.  PM Heaven!  I think that the biggest factor that prevents this in Waterfall is that the team is usually expected to multitask on multiple projects, but it can be overcome.

Unless you are delivering in chunks, or phases, working product is not a primary measure of progress in Waterfall.  Like Agile approaches, however, working product is a measure of completion or success in Waterfall.

When the next tenet refers to sustainable development and being able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely, its talking about velocity, or cadence.  You can achieve a rough cadence in Waterfall, but if you’re not estimating using story points, t-shirt sizes, powers of 2, or something else that allows for relative estimating, you can’t really talk about velocity.  I think the term 'indefinitely' scares some people.  The business always wants an end date from IT, Agile or Waterfall.

The final four are hit and miss.  Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design can enhance success, even if you’re not striving to be Agile.  Documenting what is out of scope is not the same as maximizing the amount of work not done.  I wouldn’t want a self-organizing team to touch my SAP architecture.  Lessons learned held at phase gates (instead of waiting until the end of the project) can give a team opportunity to tune and adjust.

If the Agile Manifesto and its Principles are the determining factors in whether or not a project approach is Agile, I’d be comfortable debating the potential for Agile Waterfall without using a hybrid approach.  It’s not a perfect fit, but when you compare Agile approaches (Scrum, XP, DSDM, Crystal, etc…) to these factors, not all of them are a perfect fit, either.

Back to my clickbait-worthy title.  It’s not that I think that there’s no such thing as Hybrid Agile.  I think that there’s more than one thing that could be called Hybrid Agile, but they don’t all involve Waterfall, and there is the potential to be agile (not Agile) in Waterfall, without hybridizing the approach.  Does Agile really 'own' those principles?

I was going to lead off my post with more almost-free webinars, but I didn’t want to dilute the impact of my title.  I hope my ramblings sparked some thoughts for you, whether or not you agree.  If you are a member of ScrumAlliance, you should already know about this; if you’re not, and don’t plan to get a Scrum certification, you might not care.  To get to the point, ScrumAlliance offers free webinars to its members.  This is important because you need SEUs (Scrum Education Units) to become a CSP (Certified Scrum Professional).  Being a CSP means that you have an active CSM, CSPO, or CSD and have reported 70 SEUs and 36 months of Agile/Scrum experience in the last 5 years. (sidenote – I’m excited to finally be working for a company where I have the chance to get the experience I need to become a CSP.  It’s been a few years since I became a CSM and I’ll become a CSPO in the fall.)

Unless my priorities change in the next week, we'll talk more about uncertainty, next time.