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Topics: Agile, Organizational Project Management, PMO
New Projects - More Hybrid, Traditional, or Agile?
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Donna Harvin-Graham Director, Financial Processes & Systems| American Psychological Association Washington, DC, USA
With the recent shift in project management, are you finding your projects are operating as hybrid, traditional, or agile? 
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Kiron Bondale
Community Champion
Mentor actively supporting PM practitioners in achieving their goals| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Donna -

Projects following a 100% predictive or 100% adaptive approach are a fairly small fraction as hybrid could represent lifecycle changes (e.g. water-scrum-fall), approaches used for different work packages or a mix of tools & techniques (e.g. WBS for scope definition combined with a visual work board and burndown chart for work and workflow tracking).

And as PMs expand their knowledge of different toolsets, I'd suspect that hybrid will become the rule with pure adaptive and predictive being the exception.

Kiron
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Abolfazl Yousefi Darestani Manager, Quality and Continuous Improvement| Hörmann-TNR Industrial Doors Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
I agree with Kiron. Most of them are kind of hybrid.
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Tonko Borovina Project Manager| Cloudsense Zagreb, Croatia

Dear Donna,

There is a shift in project management for sure, but still it depends on the type of the project that you are running.
There are number of factors that I'm taking into account when choosing or proposing the right methodology such as industry, dependencies, scope, flexibility, trust (if the project is for the client) etc.



I work in IT industry where agile is quite popular but from my experience if the Client is new they usually insist on traditional (waterfall) project and after some time it becomes hybrid - taking into account that the change requests process takes time. Also, the Client is more flexible to introduce the change during the project without too much administration and they are not aware of all the details at the beginning of the project.

Believe it or not. By end of last year I internal transferred to another department. And my project change from Agile back to traditional way now...
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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
There is a big mistake in clasiify projects in the way you did in your statement (please, I am not write this because your post. It is something in the market). The problem is people confuse approach with life cycle which is the first step to fail. Beyond that, to put this in the framework of PMI trying to add something to comments above, this is a matter of decision that are in the framework of business analysis. You can find there a task call "Needs Analysis" or "Strategy Analysis" (depending on the framework you take) where you can find the activities to select the approach and the life cycle. Then, it is a matter of enterprise architecture evaluation.
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George Freeman
Community Champion
PM Thought Leader and Author | Florida, USA
I’m of the principled opinion that there are no pure predictive, iterative, or incremental approach projects, as pristine execution only exists in the dreams of a PMO director. “Progressively obtained project knowledge” dictates continuous adaptations whether viewed that way or not. In other words, in the pure sense, all projects are hybrid.

In addition, it’s normal for organizations to vacillate on their opinions regarding development approaches, as the least intrusive scapegoat for cost overruns and missed objectives is the approach. Interestingly, the most recent “PMI Pulse of the Profession” states that project teams achieve comparable performance levels regardless of the development approach used on the project.

Wouldn’t it be great if the “battle of the development approach narrative” would be given a cease and desist letter? Although a heretical thought for many in our profession, it would go a long way to reemphasizing that all approaches are valid and that the arbitrator of truth is the “project need.”
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Kumar R Management Coach| NA Chennai, India
Donna,

Though Agile has been there for a long time, it is not 100% used due to various constraints. Hence project tends toward a hybrid model (a Mix of Agile & Traditional Models).
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Biwi tiwari Digital Marketing| Purple India

In my experience, our projects have shifted towards a hybrid approach, combining elements of both traditional and agile methodologies. This allows us to maintain a structured framework while also fostering adaptability and collaboration. By embracing this hybrid model, we can effectively respond to changing requirements and deliver results more efficiently. How about your projects? Have you noticed a similar trend towards hybrid project management?

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Danny Seow
Community Champion
Tokyo, Japan

The latest PMI Pulse of the Profession report for 2024 has done a great job of compiling statistics across industries regarding project management approaches.

https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/pulse

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