12 Practical Tips to Effective Hybrid Execution

The waterfall purists typically crave structure, with a clear understanding of scope, schedule and budget before commitment and adherence to scope, schedule and budget through delivery.

The agile purists typically crave nimbleness, with rolling waves of smaller logical work groupings and more frequent delivery. I’ve seen discussions on the topic devolve into shouting matches as to which methodology is the “right” one.

In my experience, project managers generally prefer waterfall while engineers prefer agile. PMI has developed the Disciplined Agile® framework, which sandwiches three hybrid levels between the waterfall and agile anchors.

While I think some of my agile purist friends might take exception to the Disciplined Agile® name (as if agile is an undisciplined framework), the way of working spectrum is a reasonable split-the-wickets acknowledgement that there can be peaceful coexistence between agile and waterfall.

Now I’ve been doing this stuff for four decades, and have seen projects from just about every vantage point performing just about every role in my career. I am actually a fan of a hybrid methodology and have successfully blended components of agile and waterfall in delivering very high-visibility initiatives.

In doing so, I’ve learned and implemented some tips that have helped me drive hybrid initiatives, as follows:

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