Chapter 1

Hybrid Project Management
Hybrid Project Management

Using Agile with Traditional
PM Methodologies to Succeed on
Modern Projects
Mark Tolbert and Susan Parente

Hybrid Project Management: Using Agile with Traditional PM
Methodologies to Succeed on Modern Projects
Copyright © Business Expert Press, LLC, 2020.
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Abstract
We live in a very interesting time. Compared to just a couple of decades

ago, there is much more volatility today in our marketplaces, the level of
competition is much greater, we are operating in global economy, work-
ing virtually is no longer an anomaly. Considering all of this, it’s much
more difficult for companies to survive. On the other hand, there are
tremendous opportunities for companies if they are able to be innovative
and resilient, they can come up the right set of products and services at
the right time.
As project managers, we are helping our companies survive in this
difficult landscape. We are “agents of change” and “drivers of change.”
We are key to helping our companies survive in this volatile, difficult
world. The most important project management methodology today that
will help us deal with this change and this volatility is Agile. I believe all
project managers need to come up-to-speed with at least the core princi-
ples of Agile, and understand how and why this is so important. Another
important aspect of an Agile approach is applying this with a virtual team.
Virtual teams have become quite common out of necessity however; too
often “Agilists” (or purists of one of the Agile methodologies) lecture that
Agile can only be done in a colocated environment. This is no longer the
reality; many of our clients are using a Hybrid Agile approach for virtual
project teams. This is a necessity for many organizations, including those
that have multiple headquarters, or even a small team which includes
experts around the world, or are located just a few hours drive away. Vir-
tual project teams are commonplace for modern day projects.
However, no one process or project management methodology fits all
situations! Agile is not a panacea for all projects. We believe that many
times our projects are large enough and complex enough that some parts
of the project are best suited to using a predictive planning approach, and
other parts are more suited to using Agile. As PMs, we need to be flexible,
and wear multiple hats: no one process or methodology fits all situations;
we need to mature and not just be a purist for one and only one approach.
Don’t be a strict Agile partisan who believes Scrum or Kanban or another
vi Abstract
Agile methodology is superior in all situations (Susan has coined the

term ‘Scrumdamentalist’ to describe this type of person), and don’t be a
“Process purist” who believes following a set of predictive planning pro-
cesses guarantees success, and must be enforced religiously. There are both
strengths and weaknesses in different approaches, and the more we are
aware of these, the more effective we will be. We should be open to using
“Hybrid approaches” that even include the traditional waterfall approach.
In this book, we will also explore several key risks frequently faced on
projects, and how Agile can help us solve these problems. We will also
address how and when a traditional project management approach using
“Predictive planning” is more appropriate.
Key risks we will explore are:
1. Poor Scope definition – (the #1 risk on projects)! This usually stems

from doing the requirements gathering process poorly:
• missing requirements
• misunderstand requirements
• misunderstanding the complexity of requirements
• missing key stakeholders, and not obtaining their
requirements
2. Impossible constraints starting out, and instances where the cus-
tomer/sponsor wants assurances these constraints will be met.
3. Allowing “Half-Baked Ideas” to survive
4. Poor communications
Other topics that will be explored are:
• How to implement a hybrid approach that employs both

traditional approaches and Agile approaches.
• Virtual Agile Teams
• Can Agile be used successfully with Earned Value (EVM)?
• A Review of Version Six of the PMBOK® Guide: Thoughts and
Retrospective
• Initial thoughts on the exposure draft of Version Seven of the
PMBOK® Guide
Abstract
vii
Intended Audience and Benefits – All project managers, program man-

agers and business executives. If you don’t know much about Agile and
Lean methodologies, or want to learn more, and also learn why Agile is so
important in our world today, we will explain why. We will also argue that
“hybrid approaches” are particularly critical today for successful project
management.
Mark Tolbert, PMP, PMI-ACP

Susan Parente, PMP, PMI-RMP, PMI-ACP, PSM I, CSM, CSPO, SFC,
CISSP, CRISC, RESILIA, ITIL, GCLP, MS Eng. Mgmt.
July 23, 2020
Keywords
agile project management; scrum; lean; extreme (xp); waterfall; predictive
planning; hybrid project management; virtual project teams; risk man-
agement; earned value management (evm); pmi; pmbok® guide; virtual;
virtual agile; colocated; team charter; trust; agile ethos
Mark: To my wife, Linda, and my three boys, David, Brian and Michael
Susan: To my husband, Dave Schwartz for all his support and for being
a source of inspiration
Inspiration for the Cover
The lighthouse theme represents our view that both Agile and hybrid
methods (where traditional approaches are combined with various Agile
approaches) are a vehicle to light the path of project uncertainty which all
PMs face today. We hope that this book will support you in reducing the
risk you face with your projects and shine light on the risks you manage,
so you are able to use the practices and principles of Agile along with
traditional practices to achieve project success for your current and future
projects.
Contents
Introduction�� xv
Acknowledgments�� xvii
Chapter 1 Hybrid Projects: The Need to Be Open to Different

Project Management Methodologies��1
Introduction��1
The Landscape for Projects Today��4
The Roots of Modern Project Management and the Case
for Traditional Project Management��6
Risk #1: The Number One Risk on Projects!��10
The Case for Agile��15
Problem Areas for Agile��29
Other Key Risks Where Agile Provides Extra Help��35
Risk #2: Allowing Half-Baked Ideas to Survive��36
Risk #3: Impossible Constraints��40
Risk #4: Poor Communications: Not Keeping Senior
Management in the Loop and Up-to-Date on the Project��48
How Do We Make Hybrid Approaches Work?��51
Chapter 1: Summary and Conclusions��62
Chapter 2 Additional Thoughts on Agile and Hybrid Projects��65
Agile Contracts: Can Agile Be Used with Fixed Price Contracts?��65
“Money for Nothing and Change for Free” Contract��69
Can Agile Be Used Effectively with EVM?��70
Another Key Risk: Configuration Management��73
Complexity on Projects: Where Does Agile Help? Where
Is a Predictive Planning Approach Needed?��78
Virtual Agile Teams—Susan Parente��80
Agile Team Charter��83
Virtual Agile Tools��84
Agile Team Development��86
Project Planning for the Virtual Agile Team��88
xiv Contents
Building Team Trust��89

Managing the Virtual Project Team��90
Best Practices for Virtual Agile Project Teams��92
Team Consensus��92
Managing Performance from a Distance��93
Summary—Virtual Agile Projects��94
Chapter 3 Overview and Thoughts about the PMBOK® Guide.
Does Agile Fit in Well with the PMBOK® Guide?��95
Overview of the PMBOK® Guide��95
Key Items Missing from the PMBOK® Guide��99
Agile Concepts (Discussed in This Chapter)��99
Relevancy��100
Terms/Concepts��100
Important Concepts in the PMBOK® Guide, Ways Agile
Expands Upon These Concepts, and Places Where Agile Is Not a
Good Fit��105
Key Lessons in Other Knowledge Areas in the
PMBOK® Guide��114
Integration Management��114
Quality Management��117
Estimating: Duration Estimates and Cost Estimates��122
Risk Management��128
Procurement Management—Different Contract Types Defined in
the PMBOK® Guide and Agile Contracts��134
Initial Comments on the Exposure Draft of Version Seven of the
PMBOK® Guide and the New “Standards Plus Digital Content
Platform”��142
Final Thoughts and Summary��150
For Further Reading – References used for this Book��153

About the Authors��155
Index��157
Introduction
Over the past five years, I’ve made a number of presentations to the
Washington, DC PMI Chapter (PMIWDC) concerning Agile Project
Management, Hybrid Projects, and how we can effectively integrate tra-
ditional project management approaches with Agile approaches to solve
real-world project problems. I have also made presentations to other local
PMI® Chapters, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other government agen-
cies on this topic. This short book combines the central ideas of these
presentations.
Mark Tolbert
Acknowledgments
I have been teaching PMP® Prep classes for the last 11 years as well as Agile
(PMI-ACP® Prep) classes for the last 4 years. I’ve added several sections
to the book with key ideas from these programs that I think are especially
important for project managers today. I’ve also been a volunteer with the
PMIWDC for most of the last 25 years, and I’ve attended a lot of dinner
meetings and listened to many great presentations. I’ve incorporated key
favorite ideas from many of these presentations in this book, too.
Lastly, Susan Parente, Jason Vorenkamp, and Carl Pritchard have also
provided excellent help reviewing the book and providing examples and
extra material. Susan has also contributed a chapter on “Virtual Agile
Teams,” and Jason provided examples for the “Problem Areas for Agile.”
Carl provided excellent feedback and suggestions in a number of areas in
the book. I am also indebted to Laurie Martin Roberts for all her great
work editing and reviewing this book.
CHAPTER 1
Hybrid Projects: The Need

to Be Open to Different
Project Management
Methodologies
Introduction
I think as project managers (PMs), we often get too wedded to one
particular methodology, and we think that this one methodology has to
be used in all situations. We become purists for this one approach. P
erhaps
the methodology is Scrum or Extreme Programming (XP), and we think
that this is the modern solution for all projects, and can and should be
used on all projects. We think waterfall and traditional approaches are a
thing of the past, and only something our fathers once had to use. There
are much better ways to do things today!1
Perhaps it’s the other way around. Maybe there’s a particular meth-
odology or set of processes that our program management office (PMO)
insists must be used on all projects. For example, the PMO stipulates that
for all projects, there must be a formally approved project charter that
is issued by the sponsor before any work is started. Additionally, there
1
This reminds me of my time as an HP systems engineer in the 1980s: I was a
die-hard defender of HP3000s and the MPE operating system, and I couldn’t see
my way to say anything positive about the DEC VAX architecture or the IBM
360/370 architecture! Similarly, I’m a die-hard sports fan today, and a complete
supporter of the Washington Nationals and Washington Capitals. I have a hard
time thinking of good things to say about opposing teams! I should really learn
to be more open-minded, yes?
2 Hybrid Project Management
must be a written, formally approved project management plan with a

minimum of 18 component pieces including formally approved base-
lines. The scope baseline must include the scope statement, a WBS (work
breakdown structure), and WBS dictionary. There must be “manage-
ment plans” that define how work and processes will be done in all nine
Knowledge Areas except Integration Management. This formal project
management plan must be approved before the “execution phases” of the
project are started. Therefore, we will do predictive planning and move
through the phases of the project in a waterfall fashion. Furthermore,
Earned Value Management (EVM) must always be used to measure our
project’s progress against the baselines. This is our culture, and the PMO
requires that this approach and set of processes be followed on all projects.
But this is too limiting and too narrow-minded, is it not? We need to
be more versatile and more open-minded. We need to recognize that no
one methodology or process is perfect for all situations. Isn’t it also the
case that most of our projects are probably large enough and complex
enough that parts of the project are very suitable for the tried-and-true
traditional methods, or waterfall methods, and other parts require creativ-
ity and exploring requirements, so they are much more suitable to Agile?
On a large, complex project, isn’t it likely that some parts are “cookie-
cutter,” so to speak? These parts involve work-packages or items that we’ve
done many times in the past, and we have very good historical records for
these parts or work-packages. For these parts, we know in detail starting
out exactly what the requirements are, and what the relative priorities
are of the requirements. “The customer knows exactly what they want at
the beginning.” These historical records will allow us to obtain very good
estimates of time and cost, and very good templates of different types
of key documents that can be used in our project. Therefore, for these
parts of the project, it will probably make sense to use predictive plan-
ning or a waterfall approach and also have a fully accountable PM2 who
2
Many people in the Agile community refer to this type of traditional PM who
is fully accountable for the project, and who is the single focal point for the
project - as a “command and control PM!” Obviously, that has negative connota-
tions, and makes it sound if all such traditional PMs are micromanagers, and are
quite dictatorial. Of course, that doesn’t have to be the case at all.
Hybrid Projects 3
is assigning all the work to the different team members. Perhaps many of
these parts of the project will be subcontracted out to external vendors,
and the work will be performed under a fixed-price contract. We must
have all the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed! There is an extensive Statement
of Work (SOW), and again, it will make most sense to use the traditional
approach.
For these “cookie-cutter projects” or “cookie-cutter parts of projects,”
why does it make a lot of sense to use predictive planning, a waterfall
approach, and have the traditional, fully accountable PM? Because it is
much less expensive and far more efficient to do so! Use the “KISS” prin-
ciple: “Keep It Simple Stupid!” or “Occam’s Razor”—“Don’t multiply
entities beyond necessity.” With Agile, we want to have a team made up
of 5 to 10 senior, dedicated members. That’s going to be very expensive
in most cases. Furthermore, ideally, we want them to be colocated. That’s
also going to be very tough to do in many cases today in our modern proj-
ect world and also very expensive. In the situation where we know exactly
what is needed starting out in the project, this is not necessary. We can
go with the traditional predictive planning model, which is much leaner
and more efficient, and accomplish our goals in the same amount of time
and for far less money.
Many of the projects I’ve worked on in my career at Hewlett-Packard
were of this nature. These were “logistics projects”—data center reloca-
tions or large “rollouts” as we called them. We were refreshing the client
PCs and other supporting servers for a large customer at numerous office
sites, we had done these types of projects many times before, and we had
very good historical records that gave us excellent estimates of time and
cost.3 So it did make sense to have a traditional PM, who was totally
3
Does that mean that these types of projects were simpler and easier? Not at all.
Everything in the project needed to run like clockwork, and the customer was
often very demanding. There was no room for errors or mistakes. As always, there
was tremendous pressure to communicate very well concerning project commit-
ments: Communicate completely and accurately to the customer and to other
key stakeholders. For this type of project, the old saying especially applies, “the
devil is in the details.” We had to be sure we were on the same page with the
customer and the other stakeholders.
accountable for the project, doing predictive planning, and handing out
all the parts of the plans of the project to the different team members
and subcontractors. These team members were working part-time on the
project and were multitasking between a number of projects.
Also, the resources on my projects were often spread out over a large
geography, so it would be impractical to have them colocated. That would
also increase the cost and in most cases would not be something that
management was readily agreeable to. Again, in my project world, we
were using virtual teams spread out over a large geography in almost all
cases, and the team members and subcontractors were working on multi-
ple projects at the same time.
The Landscape for Projects Today

However, I think the types of projects most of us are dealing with today
are much different than what I just described. How would you describe
our world today for project management? What good adjectives or
descriptive phrases would you use to describe this world that we find
ourselves in? I think it’s a more difficult, more challenging world today
than it was for PMs just a couple of decades ago. The pace of change has
increased in amazing ways. Some catchphrases that seem to apply to our
world today are:
• “Make dust or eat dust!”

• “If you are standing still, you are falling behind!”
• “The only constant is change!” (This is from 500 BC—
Ancient Greek philosophy—Heraclitus!)
• Companies are dealing with global marketplaces, and more
competition than ever.
• Customers are very demanding, very fickle.
• The need to adapt to changing marketplace conditions is
greater than ever.
• “Change or Die!”
We are dealing with a much tougher competitive landscape today—we

will say more about that momentarily—but change is occurring much
Hybrid Projects 5
more quickly than it ever did before, our customers are more demand-
ing than ever, they’re more fickle, and, therefore, it’s tougher for compa-
nies today. They have to constantly find new products, new services, and
new solutions that respond to the new demands of their customers. They
must adapt to the changing landscape of what customers are looking for.
I think Jeff Sutherland sums it up best in his book, Scrum: The Art of
Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. He simply says, “Change or die!”
I think Thomas Friedman, in several of his more recent books, explains
very well how and why we have reached this new age: an age of tremen-
dous change and increased competition. He terms this new age an “Age of
Accelerations.” He has written three books that all address this topic: the
first book was The World Is Flat, the second book That Used to Be Us: How
America Fell Behind in the World It Invented (a fairly scary and eye-open-
ing book for those of us who live in the United States), and the third book
Thank You for Being Late. Each book builds on the themes and key points
made in the preceding books. Friedman points out there were two things
that happened together over two decades ago in the early 1990s. First, it
was the breakup of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s that ushered in a
new era of globalization in the early 1990s. That brought new countries
into our capitalist marketplaces, and this raised the bar of competition
in very significant ways. Of course, we’re talking about China, but also
India, and many other countries.
Something else also happened at the same time in the early 1990s that
was a tremendous game changer. Of course, that was the advent of the
Internet, and the Internet has changed almost everything about how we
live, how we play, and how we do business and work. Global teams can
collaborate on work, share documents, and communicate in very creative
and new ways.
Here is another type of example of how the Internet has changed our
world. Imagine that a group of young entrepreneurs has come together
with an idea for a new business solution. The team is confident this busi-
ness solution is going to have a lot of appeal to people and make a big
impact. They don’t need the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar manufac-
turing operation to produce the products they are envisioning—they can
outsource that. For advertising and marketing, they can outsource that
too. They can even find very creative ways to get financing to provide
the necessary funding for this opportunity. Bottom line, it’s much easier
today for people to form new companies to go after opportunities, and
people are doing exactly that today. This has raised the level of compe-
tition in major ways. A number of different writers say that the Internet
has brought about as profound a change in our world as the Gutenberg
printing press did in the 15th century. So, in short, we’re living in this
age of accelerations with tremendous change and a heightened level of
competition.
Why does this matter to us as PMs? Why do we care about all this
volatility, difficult marketplaces, and the challenges our companies are
facing? Of course, it’s simply because we are helping our companies sur-
vive in these difficult times. We are managing change for them, and we
are helping our companies create the new products and solutions that
will resonate with customers. We are drivers of change in this new world!
Therefore, our companies need us to be very good at managing projects
and to be up-to-speed with the latest methodologies. So, what project
management methodology is best suited for coping with change and
handling volatility? Of course, that’s an easy answer; the answer is Agile!
But we shouldn’t discard the tried and true—the traditional waterfall
approaches. As we’ll see, this methodology also has an important role in
many projects. We need to be open-minded and know when and where
to use the different approaches and the strengths and weaknesses of the
different approaches.
The Roots of Modern Project Management and the

Case for Traditional Project Management
From what industry did project management arise and who wrote the
first books and anthologies on project management? It was the construc-
tion and engineering industry that provided the foundations of our mod-
ern project management practices. The first authors of college textbooks
on project management were engineering professors: people like Clelland
and King (1968) and Harold Kerzner (1979).
Some people might say that modern project management starts with
Henry Gantt and Gantt charts in 1910. These were used successfully with
the Hoover Dam project in the 1930s. Other people point to the 1950s
Hybrid Projects 7
with the advent of Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT),

which was used with the Navy Polaris Submarine program, and with criti-
cal path method (CPM), devised in the late 1950s at DuPont. Also, much
of the traditional project management approach comes to us from the
1960s and the Department of Defense (DoD). Much of what we teach
in our Project Management Professional (PMP®) Prep classes is based on
the core principals developed in DoD, especially EVM and the WBS. The
WBS is a key part of Earned Value (EV) and is very close to the heart of
the traditional PM. The WBS drives all planning, or is the “cornerstone of
all planning.” It drives scheduling, cost estimating, and budgeting, deter-
mining quality acceptance values, resource estimating, identifying risks,
and deciding what we want to outsource. Of course, we also have the 100
percent rule: “100 percent of the project must be in the WBS! If it’s not
in the WBS, it’s not in the project!”
What is the lifecycle model that is very closely tied to traditional proj-
ect management? The “waterfall lifecycle approach” and the use of predic-
tive planning. This model entails:
• Performing exhaustive, detailed planning for all phases of the

project at the beginning (“The devil is in the details!”). There-
fore, don’t leave any stones unturned; figure out all require-
ments, in detail, in your planning phases at the beginning of
the project. Plan everything so well from the beginning that
change won’t be needed! As Harold Kerzner says in his text-
book on project management,4 do planning so well that scope
changes are kept to a minimum.
• Hierarchically decomposing your original business require-
ments and functional requirements to a very detailed level
using a WBS.
• Obtaining accurate, detailed estimates for time and cost at
the work-package level using techniques such as bottom-up
estimating, parametric estimating, and PERT three-point
estimating.
4
Project Management—A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and
Controlling by Harold Kerzner, Ph.D., p. 6.
• Measuring performance during the project using EVM.

• Measuring performance against all three baselines (scope,
schedule, and cost) using EVM, and using Quantitative Risk
Analysis techniques to more accurately define contingency
reserves to include in the cost baseline and schedule baseline.
If you’re building a new bridge or building, you probably want to

use this waterfall approach. You had better get very detailed, accurate
blueprints created before you start construction. Then, you will need very
accurate baselines with which to measure your performance. Detailed
blueprints (and a WBS) will allow you to create an accurate schedule and
budget, so you can measure your performance against time and cost. Ide-
ally, you will use EVM to do this. In EVM, they like to say, “To do project
management properly, you need to have defined scope.” If you have this,
you can define all three key baselines: scope, schedule, and cost.
EVM really works hand-in-hand with traditional project manage-
ment and a waterfall approach. For EVM to work, we need to have very
accurate baselines and a very accurate BAC (budget at completion). In an
excellent book on EV written by Fleming and Koppelman, Simple Earned
Value on All Projects—(Simplified Translations of the 27 EVM Criteria),
they state the most important of all the 27 criteria is the very first one.
Here is their translation:
Step 1: To the extent possible, you must define the full scope of the
project.—(Equates to EVM Criterion #1)
• This is perhaps the most important requirement for imple-

menting earned value, and perhaps the most difficult to
achieve. Management of certain types of projects, notably
software, often give up at this point and refuse to go further.
They often relinquish (p. 160).
They go further on p. 178:
• The first group of criteria deals with the requirement for any
new project to be completely defined, and planned, prior to
starting performance of the work. Today, we would typically
call this effort defining the scope of the project. Think about
Hybrid Projects 9
it: Earned Value Measurement cannot take place without

some definition of what constitutes 100 percent of the project.
Why is it so crucial in construction and engineering to first obtain the full

scope of the entire project—all the requirements spelled out in detail—
before we start construction? The answer is pretty obvious. If there’s a
mistake in our blueprints and construction begins; and, if the mistake
in the blueprints is not discovered until weeks have gone by, and a lot of
construction work has been done, all that engineering and construction
work might have to be torn up and redone. Of course, that is going to be
very, very expensive. Someone’s probably going to lose their job!
My youngest son, Michael, works for a design/build mechanical firm
using 3D CAD (computer-aided design). He’s creating the blueprints
for all the mechanical and plumbing work in large high-rise apartment
buildings. He’s told me, “Dad, if my blueprints for the mechanical and
plumbing design in the building are off by even a quarter of an inch, then
there will be hell to pay.” Predictive planning must be done, and every
detail nailed down, too. Michael’s BIM (Building Information Modeling)
team must coordinate everything at the start of a construction project
to collaborate with the engineering team and make sure each floor of
the building is “clash free” (virtually) before construction starts. This is
necessary to avoid expensive change orders that could potentially happen
in the field. For example, suppose the BIM team didn’t realize there was
a 24 × 48 beam blocking a 22 × 14 duct going into the lobby area! “The
Devil is in the details!”
Is predictive planning and this attention to detail only critical in
construction and engineering projects where the cost of change once we
started construction could be very, very high? If we’re doing a software
application, and the change will just involve moving bits around and
recompiling programs, do we still have the same urgency to get all our
requirements totally correct at the beginning? Is it even possible to do
that?
On construction projects, it’s usually the case that the customer
knows much more precisely what they want going into the project than
they would on a typical software project, or “knowledge work” project.
Perhaps it is a new office building. In most cases, the customer will know
exactly what they can afford, when the building needs to be completed,
and the other requirements: number of offices, conference rooms, size
of the lobby area, number of floors and footprint, power and HVAC
requirements, networking requirements, architectural style, and so on.
The architect will create detailed blueprints and models that the customer
will review and accept before construction begins. Or … perhaps it’s a
home kitchen remodeling project. The key stakeholder—the wife—will
choose exactly what appliances she wants, the cabinets, and counter-tops.
Perhaps a general contractor will be engaged, and after design meetings
with the homeowners, they will create blueprints or CAD drawings of
the new kitchen that the homeowners will accept or modify. Again,
the customer will determine, in detail, all the requirements before the
“demolition” and “remodeling” phases begin. Therefore, on these types
of projects, it’s a much more straightforward process to obtain all the
requirements upfront at the beginning of the project.
These types of projects are much more conducive to using a fixed-
price contract. Once given the detailed requirements, the contractor will
be able to determine their costs precisely and generate a fixed-price bid.
(Fixed-price contracts and other contracts are presented in more detail
in Chapter 2—“Agile Contracts: Can Agile Be Used with Fixed-Price
Contracts?”)
Risk #1: The Number One Risk on Projects!
There are several other reasons the traditional “waterfall” methodology

often makes sense. What is the principal cause of failure on projects and,
therefore, our “Number One Risk?” It’s having a poorly written scope
statement: a vague, ambiguous scope statement. If we allow that to hap-
pen, there will be no hope for this project. In a key process—Validate
Scope—defined in the Scope Management KA, Project Management Body
of Knowledge (PMBOK®) Guide,5 we bring in the customer to inspect
deliverables that we’ve created and obtain their formal acceptance. If our
scope statement is vague or ambiguous, and the acceptance criteria in
Project Management Institute, A Guide to the Project Management Body of

5
Knowledge, Sixth Edition, Project Management Institute, Inc., 2017.

Hybrid Projects 11
the scope statement are poorly written—not “SMART”—specific, mea-

surable, agreed, realistic, and timebound—how is this meeting with the
customer going to go? Of course, not well at all! What are we likely to
hear? “I’m sorry, but this isn’t exactly what I’m looking for.” … and, of
course … “Weren’t you listening? I absolutely need to have these other
requirements too!” … etc. And, if our scope statement is vague or ambig-
uous and if the acceptance criteria for this deliverable were poorly written,
then we’re going to have to add in these extra requirements at our own
expense. This leads to what we hate most—Scope Creep!6 Scope Creep is
“The uncontrolled expansion of project scope or product scope without
making adjustments to time, cost and resources,”7 which leads to schedule
delays, budget overruns, customer satisfaction issues, and senior man-
agement satisfaction issues with the project. And, very likely, a new PM!
Therefore, follow all the PMBOK® Guide planning processes in Scope
Management very well: Plan Scope Management; Collect Requirements;
Define Scope; Create WBS. Following these processes ensures you are on
the same page with the customer; all the requirements have been captured
and the acceptance criteria for the deliverables are “SMART.”
This leads us to a discussion of why the job of the PM is a very difficult
job. I like to say, “Project management is not for sissies!” Project manage-
ment is essentially all about people skills or soft skills. It is not really about
understanding the technical intricacies of scheduling tools like Microsoft
Project, Primavera, or Artemis (e.g., understanding how to do a forward
pass and backward pass; understanding the difference between total float
and free float). It is not about understanding the arcane tools and tech-
niques mentioned for Quantitative Risk Analysis: EMV (expected mon-
etary value) or Monte Carlo simulation or decision trees or a sensitivity
analysis. It is not about the “IQ (Intellectual Quotient) part of the equa-
tion”; it is about the “EQ (Emotional Quotient) part of the equation” or
6
To be technically correct, “Scope Creep” is not a risk, it’s the effect or outcome
if we do not handle risks in Scope Management well. Once a risk occurs, it’s no
longer a risk; it’s an “issue.” Risks are all about uncertainty and probability.
7
Project Management Institute, A Guide to the Project Management Body of
Knowledge, (PMBOK® Guide), Sixth Edition, Project Management Institute,
2017, Page 168.
emotional intelligence. What is the key part of emotional intelligence or

the key part of people skills and soft skills? Clearly, the answer is good
communication skills. What is the essence of having good communica-
tion skills? (Something that technical people like me have a lot of diffi-
culty with!) Good listening skills. All good communicators are necessarily
very good listeners.
In the PMBOK® Guide, PMI® does not put any priorities on the pro-
cesses in the different Knowledge Areas. But I will go out on a limb and
do that! I think the highest priority Knowledge Areas are Scope Man-
agement; Communications Management; and Stakeholder Management.
Success on our projects directly depends on how well we perform key
processes in these Knowledge Areas, and these Knowledge Areas all really
overlap one another (Figure 1.1).
Requirements: Charter ->

Scope Statement
Stakeholder
Communications
Management
Figure 1.1 Foundational KAs (processes)
1. As we said, our principal risk involves doing Scope Management well

and this starts with doing the requirements gathering process well.
• Don’t miss any requirements.
• Don’t misunderstand the requirements.
Hybrid Projects 13
• Don’t misunderstand the complexity of the requirements:

Decompose requirements properly.
• Don’t miss any key stakeholders in obtaining requirements.
2. Successfully obtaining requirements involves communicating very
well with the customer and other key stakeholders. This includes
listening! Follow well-accepted practices like JAD (joint application
design) and QFD (quality function deployment). In essence, get
those engineers out of their offices to go meet with the customer.
Have productive conversations with the customer to truly under-
stand what they are seeking. Don’t assume that we know best what
the customer really wants! Get out of our offices, follow the customer
around to see what they’re really needing. Even better, try out their
job for part of the day, so we truly understand what they need.
3. Let’s assume that we do the requirements gathering process very
well; we erred on the side of inclusiveness, we’ve done brainstorm-
ing, we’ve been creative, and we correctly captured all the different
stakeholder requirements. Are we now in good shape? Are we going
to be successful? No, not necessarily! This is where the hard part of
project management comes in. Are the stakeholders all in agreement
for the requirements for the project? Of course not! The require-
ments they want are all over the map. They have different needs and
different wants. Somehow, someway, we have to get them onto the
same page. If we don’t do that, this project is surely going to fail,
and who’s going to take the blame? Not these stakeholders who are
giving us all these inconsistent requirements. No, you will take the
blame (the PM).
Many of the PMP® Prep books completely misunderstand this
key point about what is happening as we move from Collect Require-
ments to Define Scope. The PMBOK® Guide doesn’t even emphasize
this enough! Many people think that as we move into Define Scope,
we are just digging into more and more detail. That is not the key
purpose of Define Scope. No, the key purpose is to get everyone onto
the same page; “define boundaries,” and “define exclusions.” This is
the hard part of project management. No matter what powers we
have as PMs—we could be that very empowered PM in a strong
matrix organization that we assume is the default for the PMP®
exam—we will never have enough power to legislate what will be in

scope and what will not be in scope. No matter how powerful we are,
we are dealing with stakeholders who are much more powerful than
we are: the sponsor and other senior managers in our own organi-
zation, the customer, even stakeholders in other organizations (e.g.,
federal regulatory organizations).
Nonetheless, for this project to succeed, we must get everybody
onto the same page; we must define the boundaries and the exclu-
sions for the project. If this doesn’t happen, this project will fail.
I’ve been to many dinner meetings for the Washington, DC PMI®
Chapter (PMIWDC) over the past 20+ years, and I’ve heard many
excellent presentations about projects where things went dreadfully
wrong. In almost all cases (F-22, Affordable Healthcare Act website
project, etc.), these projects failed because this problem was not cor-
rectly handled. So, we must obtain requirements correctly and create
a well-written scope statement with SMART acceptance criteria. To
do that, we must do communications very well, but we must also
do Stakeholder Management very well to define these boundaries and
exclusions.
By the way, who has most of the risk in this situation? The spon-
sor? The customer? The senior managers who gave us the incompati-
ble requirements? No, the PM has the risk! If we fail to get everyone
on the same page and proceed trying to run this project, it is surely
going to fail. When that happens, who will take the blame, and who
will be looking for a new job? We will: the PM!
4. Criterion number one, defined in the most current EVM specifi-
cation, is directly addressing this point, “to the extent possible you
must define the full scope of the project!”
But, let’s suppose we do all this correctly; we do correctly follow the plan-
ning processes in Scope Management defined in the PMBOK® Guide,
we do get boundaries and exclusions defined, and do get everyone “onto
the same page.” Does that now guarantee success for the project? No, it
does not!
Hybrid Projects 15
The Case for Agile

Suppose the customer doesn’t know exactly what they want at the begin-
ning of the project, and they want a new solution created for them. They
know high-level business requirements or functional requirements, but
they don’t know the exact detailed engineering solution. That needs to
be explored and discovered, and it’s understood there’s going to be some
trial and error in discovering the best engineering solution. But, instead of
using an iterative approach, we follow the guidance of Fleming and Kop-
pelman, and we do our best at the beginning of the project to uncover
in a detailed way all the scope requirements. It is 1978, and we are using
a waterfall approach for developing this application. We are going to do
predictive planning! (Waterfall approaches using “predictive planning”
were typically used for developing software applications in the 1970s
and 1980s. Some people are still using this type of approach for software
applications today!) A simplified view of the waterfall lifecycle model we
used might look like the one in Figure 1.2.
We spent several months interviewing all the different stakeholders
on the project, making sure that we didn’t miss anyone or leave anyone
out. We thoroughly captured all of their requirements for this new appli-
cation: layouts of reports they wanted to see, the graphical user interface
(GUI) for input screens, file layouts of other input files, expected response
times and throughput times, and other details. We created the user
Organize the project in phases. Phases are often organized in a
sequential manner (or “Waterfall” structure.)
Conceptual
Design
Detailed
Design
Development
Unit Testing
Integrated
Testing
Phases
Figure 1.2 Traditional project lifecycle structure

requirements documentation (the functional specification). We obtained

all the necessary approvals, and had a bow tied around these documents.
We then turned over these documents to the systems analysts, who
did the detailed design. They hierarchically decomposed the applica-
tion: from the application down to programs, from the programs down
to modules, from modules down to subroutines, and from subroutines
down to functions, and so forth. They defined the interfaces between each
level and the parameters that would be passed. They defined all the file
layouts. This also took several months to accomplish. Again, the necessary
approvals were obtained on the subsystem specification, or the system
architecture document. Now, the system architecture documentation was
turned over to the Cobol and Fortran programmers, who did the coding
and development. How long did that take? An average application at the
time of 1978 was usually more than 100,000 lines of code, and it typically
took more than a year to do all the coding and unit testing. Then the
programmers brought all their code together to do integrated testing, and
this could also take more than a month or two.
Finally, that glorious day arrived: UAT! (User acceptance testing).
How did UAT go? Not well at all! Why? Well, how long was it before the
customer really got to see the running application? It was 18 months or
longer! What’s happened in that year and a half? The world has changed!
By the time of UAT, there were much better ways to do things; better
ways to index records to provide faster response times; and better GUIs
and screen designs for inputting data and reviewing data. The customer
wanted these new technologies, and was not happy with an application
that had been designed 18 months or more earlier. Even more fundamen-
tally, it’s not until the customer uses the application, sees real response
times and throughput times, plays with the screens and sees how every-
thing works that they realize what they really needed in the first place. So,
they are not happy at all!
Therefore, Fleming and Koppelman were wrong! It’s not that as soft-
ware PMs we gave up too soon and didn’t try hard enough to determine
the real requirements the customer needed; it just wasn’t possible to do
that. The world was changing too quickly, and at the time of obtaining
the user requirements, we could not see, and the customer could not see,
how things would change and what detailed engineering solution would
Hybrid Projects 17
Iterations in a Software/Knowledge Work Project
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
Iteration 3
Iteration 4
Figure 1.3 The “Cone of Uncertainty”
work best. In our world today—Tom Friedman’s “Age of Accelerations”—

as PMs, we are dealing much more with the “Cone of Uncertainty”
(Figure 1.3).
In the first iterations of the project, it’s impossible to predict accurately
exactly what detailed design solution will work best for the project at its
end-date—perhaps one year out, or longer. The world is changing very
quickly, and new technologies and solutions will become available, and
these will likely change the final engineering solution the team decides
upon. It’s also impossible at the beginning to get accurate forecasts of
time and cost for the entire project (or release). Our job is to discover
and explore what will work best. It’s implied that in this “Age of Acceler-
ations” and very volatile requirements, we are under much more pressure
to deliver quickly, and there are tight schedule constraints. We need the
team of 5 to 10 senior, colocated, “generalizing specialists” to help us
meet these tight schedule constraints.
So, what is the best way to handle these types of situations? For soft-
ware applications or “knowledge work” projects based on intellectual
work and design work, the best approach is to do things iteratively; use
Agile. In very short iterations—one to four weeks—get a subset of the
application out to the customer, and let them kick the tires so to speak,
and find out what has value and what does not. The Agile lifecycle is
going to look as given in Figure 1.4.
“Initiation” Release Planning Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3

Create Charter Story Estimating Sprint Planning Sprint Planning Sprint Planning
Create Backlog Planning Poker Development Development Development
High-level estimates Build Release Plan Unit Testing Unit Testing Unit Testing
Create Roadmap Integrated Testing Integrated Testing Integrated Testing
Story Maps Sprint Review/ Sprint Review/ . Sprint Review/
Demo. Retrospective Demo. Retrospective Demo. Retrospective
Figure 1.4 Agile lifecycle
Once we get through the initiation phase and the release planning
phase, and into the “development iterations,” each development iteration
is a vertical slice of the entire project, and aspects of all phases are used
in each development iteration. (Also, it goes without saying that all five
process groups are used in each iteration.) In each development iteration,
we will do planning, we will execute against those plans to create “prod-
uct increment”—something empirical and tangible (usually a prototype
of some deliverable, but not a throwaway prototype) and something that
can go into production. In each development iteration, we will also do
testing and quality control (QC) and get acceptance from the product
owner and/or customer.
A key aspect of what happens using Agile approaches and doing
things iteratively is that we are using Lean. Lean is a core part of all the
different Agile methodologies. With Lean, we are “grooming the value
chain” and “identifying fast failures” (or identifying failures fast). When
we go to obtain requirements from our customers, what are they likely to
give us? Everything! Really! Everything under the sun remotely imagined
for this project. And … everything is priority one! Doesn’t the federal
government do this in most of their requests for proposals (RFPs)? As I
remember things, for a large federal IT procurement RFP in the 1990s—
TAC4—there was so much in the RFP that even a huge company like
mine (Hewlett-Packard) could not meet all the requirements on our own.
We had to find vendors and subcontractors, who could fill the gaps of
what we could not provide to have any hope of winning this opportunity.
Was the federal government likely to use all these requirements? Never!
In one Standish survey of several years ago, it was quoted that “65%
of the requirements the customer thinks they absolutely have to have will
Hybrid Projects 19
never be used.” There is some controversy about how the Standish group
came up with this 65 percent number, but another way of viewing the sit-
uation that is widely accepted is another version of Pareto’s law. For Qual-
ity Management, all my PMP® Prep students know that Pareto’s law is “80
percent of the problems come from 20 percent of the causes.” In sales,
Pareto’s law is “80 percent of your orders come from 20 percent of your
customers.” In requirements, Pareto’s law is “80 percent of the customer’s
need comes from 20 percent of the requirements.” Therefore, using Agile,
we will go after this 20 percent of the requirements in our first iterations.
Very quickly we will get something out to the customer that is empirical
and tangible, and demonstrates this “product increment” to them. We
will find out what has value and what does not. If features we’ve included
in the product turn out not to have value, then we will delete these from
the “backlog.” We won’t invest in them further; we won’t have to do fur-
ther integrated testing, we won’t have to do as much documentation, and
therefore, we will save time and we will save money. We will keep “groom-
ing the value chain” using Lean.
Creating something that’s empirical and tangible, and then demon-
strating this to the product owner and the customer, also has tremendous
value. It is far more valuable to show them something empirical, than just
have them review large documents of specifications. In a wonderful quote
from Doug DeCarlo in his excellent book, Extreme Project Management,
he says, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a
thousand pictures.” The product increment we are creating in each itera-
tion is very similar to a prototype, but it is not just a model, or a mockup
of the deliverable that will be thrown away. What we are creating is a
subset of the overall application or solution, but it is something that will
go into production.
In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time,8 Suther-
land gives us a number of real-world examples of the benefits of Agile.
One of these case examples was from 2006 and involved Medco.9 At that
time Medco was the world’s largest online pharmacy.
8
Jeff Sutherland is one of the coauthors of Scrum along with Ken Schwaber.
9
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland,
J.J. Sutherland p. 111.
Here are some key bullet points from this case example:
Medco, 2006
• At the time, Medco was a Fortune 100 Firm: world’s largest

online pharmacy.
• Medco planned to rollout a new online pharmacy that would
link patients with a pharmacist who would review all their
different prescriptions and ensure there were no conflicts.
Furthermore, they would guarantee a significant cost savings
for patients moving to this online pharmacy.
• The CEO had checked with the IT management team and
received assurances this was technically feasible, but he did
not get any details on how long it would take!
• He promised Wall Street that this new online pharmacy capa-
bility would be available in one year, by July 7, 2007!
• Wall Street loved this entire idea, and Medco’s stock took a
very nice jump upwards.
• However, the people who had to implement this capability
did not learn they would be going forward with the mas-
sive project until after the CEO had made the commitment
to Wall Street! But the challenges to implement this were
immense!
• Much of the software the company relied upon to direct
on-site robots was badly outdated.
• In Medco’s five gargantuan plants, filled with 4,000 pharma-
cists processing prescriptions, robots whizzed about pulling
pills while other robots handled packaging and mailing, and
all those systems had to talk to one another with 100 percent
accuracy, or someone would die!
• It took the company six months to figure out they couldn’t do
it on time.
• In the best-case scenario, it would be a year late!
• They thought they could plan everything ahead of time. They
spent months of effort making a detailed project management
plan with pretty charts. This was all fiction!
Hybrid Projects 21
• There were reams of paper outlining requirements, compli-

ance, all sorts of reports, and quality assurance (QA). The
stack of requirements documentation was two feet tall.
• There were so many people involved and at loggerheads that
everything was deadlocked.
• So, they used the Scrum process to pull out the most essential
requirements (backlog items).
• They wrote all these items down on sticky notes, plastering
the walls with hundreds and hundreds of sticky notes. (This
process of pulling out the minimum viable product items and
writing them down on sticky notes took several hours.)
• Then, they conducted a high-level estimation of the backlog
items.
• And, finally, “What do we need to do first?” Prioritize the
work—what is the “20 percent of the requirements that
would fulfill 80 percent of the need?”
• Bottom line—Medco met their July 2007 date!
I believe many Agilists miss the key point of using Lean. They think
the key purpose of using Lean with Agile methodologies is eliminating
and reducing waste. Here are the classic seven key types of waste (from
Poppendieck) that we focus on eliminating:
• Partially done work

• Extra processes
• Extra features
• Task switching
• Waiting
• Motion
• Defects
Eliminating this type of waste is important, but this is not the key
thing we are achieving using Lean. As we are seeing in this Medco exam-
ple, the most important benefit of using Lean for our projects, today,
is identifying the 20 percent of the requirements that will provide 80
percent of the customer’s need and continuously grooming the value

chain. We are going to save time and money if we do this right. Involving
the customer on a much more frequent basis to review what the team is
creating is also instrumental to achieving this goal. If we use Lean prop-
erly, we are going to create something of higher value as we iteratively
move through the project than if we used a predictive planning approach
to figure out everything, in detail, at the beginning. Starting out, we can’t
predict exactly what it is we will achieve at the end of the project, or at the
end of the release, but if we use Lean properly, it will be of higher value!
At a College of Performance Management (CPM) meeting I attended
a couple of years ago (this was a meeting attended by more than 50 senior
EVM program managers), the attendees were trying to solve the problem
of how they could use Agile effectively with their EVM programs. The
federal government was demanding that they do this, and frankly, the
program managers were scratching their heads and wondering how and
why they should do this. They could see the benefits of running daily
standup meetings in many of their projects, and using burndown charts
and Kanban Boards, but from my vantage point, they were missing the
whole point of why we use Agile. It’s really about reaping the benefits
of using Lean, especially for software and “knowledge work” projects.
As I’ll discuss further, if we do this right, we can achieve a 300 percent
or greater improvement in our productivity! After the meeting, in the
“social networking part” of the meeting, I tried to explain this to one of
the EVM program managers, and he looked at me incredulously and said
something to the effect that I was an Agile zealot. (I’ll leave out his exact
phrasing!) I replied back, “No, I’m really not. I’m an enthusiastic hybrid
zealot!” (Again, my exact words will be omitted!)10
In Agile, we’re actually improving and speeding up the classic plan-do-
check-act (PDCA) loop. The PDCA loop was given to us by Walter She-
whart and W. Edwards Deming. (Shewhart originated this idea in 1939,
and Deming added on more thought for its use in 1950.) The PDCA
10
For another example of how Agile allows to quickly identify the 20 percent
of the requirements that will meet 80 percent of the customer’s need in the first
iterations of a project, see the section in Agile Contracts on “Money for Nothing
and Change for Free” contracts.
Hybrid Projects 23
loop has become the foundation for the best accepted practices in Quality
Management for how to achieve continuous improvement, or Kaizen, on
our projects. (“Kaizen” is the Japanese term for continuous improvement.
“Kai” is to alter or to change; “Zen” is to improve.) The idea is to “Make
small incremental, continuous improvements in all aspects of your proj-
ect; your products, your plans and documents, and even your processes.
Don’t try to solve everything at once; don’t try to ‘boil the ocean’; do
things incrementally and iteratively.” Of course, this shouldn’t only be
applied to projects; it applies to both projects and operations. It applies to
all steps in the entire product lifecycle. In fact, the PDCA loop and Lean
and the Toyota Production System have their origin in manufacturing
processes and operational processes. The best of the modern proprietary
quality methodologies—Six Sigma, Toyota Production System—Lean,
Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Just-in-Time (JIT),
ISO-9000 (International Organization of Standardization)—are focused
on improving operational and manufacturing processes, and using the
PDCA loop is emphasized in all these proprietary methodologies.
Lean later evolved into the Lean Software Development movement as
a subculture of the Agile movement in the early 2000s. But, interestingly,
in the PMBOK® Guide, for determining the business case for the project,
and in the Cost Management chapter, doing “lifecycle costing” has always
been emphasized. Thus, this is a part of traditional project management.
The idea is, as you do your project, don’t take a short-range view. Don’t
make decisions that save money and costs for the project lifecycle where
such decisions could lower quality on the product or make it hard to
maintain the product in operations and, therefore, hurt the company in
the long term. Take the long-term view. Design the product for the long
run, so it is easy and practical to maintain and has the right level of qual-
ity (so it doesn’t have to be repaired frequently!) to protect the company
into the future. Therefore, as we do our projects, protect the entire prod-
uct lifecycle. Design in the right QC processes, make sure the project is
consistent with the company’s quality policies and methodologies, and
that process improvement processes have been designed into the project.
Use the best-quality processes inside the project itself.
In Agile, we’re speeding up this PDCA loop in some very important
ways. On a classic software development project (circa 1978!), how often
did we meet with the customer? Not very often! We met with them at
the beginning of the project to obtain user requirements and to write the
functional specification, and then, we went away for almost two years
to develop the application. It wasn’t until UAT—often times two years
after the start—when the customer saw the real, running application.
We might have demonstrated some mock transactions or models of the
application at various times to them in the interim, but it wasn’t the real
application with real response times, throughput times, and actual trans-
actions. So, again, there was usually some real disappointment at UAT
with the application we had developed. In Agile, we’re taking a very dif-
ferent approach. We’re speeding up the feedback cycles with the customer
in important ways, but also between all members of the project team.
The feedback cycles being used on an XP project are given in
Figure 1.5.
Iteration Demo /
Review Meeting
Acceptance Testing
Standup Meeting
Continuous
Collaboration
Continuous
Integration
Automated
Testing
Pair
Programming
Figure 1.5 Levels of feedback and improvement and knowledge

sharing—XP + Scrum
Hybrid Projects 25
• Using “pair programming”: code is tested in seconds.

• Unit test/automated testing: There is feedback in minutes.
• Continuous integration: Feedback in hours.
• Customer collaboration: Feedback in hours.
• Standup meeting: Feedback once a day.
• Acceptance test: Feedback in days.
• Iteration demo (review meeting): Feedback in weeks.
• Release review meeting: Feedback in months.
Increasing the frequency of communications with the customer and the

feedback loops within the entire team significantly reduces the cost of change
on a project. When I am teaching a PMP® Prep class, I get to a juncture in
the class where I ask, “When do stakeholders have the most influence on a
project?” And the students readily reply, “They will have the most influence,
of course, at the very beginning of the project.” And the reason is simple:
the cost of change is the lowest at the beginning of the project. Once blue-
prints have been created for the project, then the stakeholders’ influence has
decreased, because if they change their mind on the design, they will have to
throw out the existing blueprints and get new blueprints created. Of course,
that is expensive. Once the actual construction of the building begins and a
key stakeholder changes the design for the building, then the cost of change is
prohibitively high. Their influence to change the project at that point is very
limited; their influence decreases as the cost of change increases. So, we show
the students a slide where we see the cost of change as a line running diago-
nally to the influence of stakeholders. It would look like that in Figure 1.6.
Phases Conceptual Detailed Coding/ Unit Integrated

Design Design Development Testing Testing
Figure 1.6 Stakeholder influence and cost of change in traditional

projects
Cost
Phases Conceptual Detailed Coding/ Unit Integrated

Design Design Development Testing Testing
Time
Figure 1.7 Real cost of change in traditional projects
However, for a project where we are creating a new software appli-

cation or for a “knowledge work project,” the cost of change line is not
really a diagonal line. Since there is a lengthy period of time between
the requirements gathering process and UAT—oftentimes more than a
year—the cost of change line will have a nasty curve or uptick at the end
of the project. Every change the customer wants at that point will have
tremendous ramifications. Every change will touch many other parts of
the project and will be very expensive. The cost of change line ends up
looking like that in Figure 1.7.
With Agile approaches, by increasing the frequency of communica-
tions with the customer, by increasing the number and frequency of feed-
back loops, and by speeding up the PDCA loop, we flatten out the cost
of change curve. Since we are meeting with the customer at minimum
every month in iteration review meetings—but, in most cases much more
frequently than that—the cost of change line looks like as in Figure 1.8.
Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3 Iteration 4 Iteration 5

Sprint Planning Sprint Planning Sprint Planning Sprint Planning Sprint Planning
Development Development Development Development Development
Unit Testing Unit Testing Unit Testing Unit Testing Unit Testing
Integrated Testing Integrated Testing Integrated Testing Integrated Testing Integrated Testing
Sprint Review/Demo. Sprint Review/Demo. Sprint Rev./Demo Sprint Rev./Demo Sprint Review/Demo
Retrospective Retrospective Retrospective Retrospective Retrospective
Cost
Figure 1.8 Reducing the “cost of change” with Agile

Hybrid Projects 27
Jeff Sutherland gives us a couple of examples of how speeding up the

feedback cycle and also the PDCA loop can reduce the cost on a project.
These examples are provided in the section entitled “Do It Right the First
Time” and “Fix Problems as Soon as You Find Them.”11 The first example
involves a lesson learned at Palm in the early 2000s with their production
of applications for personal digital assistants (PDAs). These devices were
the predecessors of our smartphones today, and originally, they provided a
number of applications such as a calendar function, spreadsheet software,
and a notebook function. Palm learned that if a bug was discovered in a
new application being developed, if the programmer fixed the bug imme-
diately, it took one hour to make the fix. If the programmer waited three
weeks, it took 24 hours to make the fix, or 24 times longer! A second
example contrasts the way Toyota produces a Lexus today, with the way a
Mercedes or BMW is built. A Lexus is made in 16.8 hours with 34 defects
per 100 cars. If anyone on the team discovers a defect, they can stop pro-
duction until the defect is fixed. In contrast, a BMW or Mercedes is made
in 57 hours, and the German manufacturers do their quality testing after
the car is produced. They spend more time fixing problems than Toyota
does in producing their car!
Using Agile and Lean can provide tremendous advantages to us and
help us avoid some of the classic pitfalls with our #1 Risk: a poorly written
scope statement, or not being on the same page with the customer. This
is especially important in our modern world of very volatile requirements
and tremendous change: Tom Friedman’s “world of accelerations.” Also,
providing something empirical and tangible to the product owner (and
customer) on a very frequent basis has tremendous advantages. Again,
Doug DeCarlo’s quote is especially apt here, “If a picture is worth a thou-
sand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.”
Sutherland says that the normal productivity gain from using Scrum
will be 300 to 400 percent! Some teams have achieved an 800 percent
improvement in productivity. He cites another case where a business
friend was very impressed with a 25 to 35 percent improvement that
they had achieved using Scrum. His immediate reaction was, “You must
11
J.J. Sutherland p. 97.
be doing something wrong!” The key benefit is not providing new tools
for the development team. No, the key benefit is much more frequently
demonstrating product increment to customers—the product owner—
and determining what has value.
As we said, Lean is actually something that needs to be used all across
the entire product lifecycle: from business development, through the
project lifecycle, through testing, through QC and QA through inte-
grating in Cybersecurity, and into the full part of the operational lifecy-
cle. This is a key point the DevOps authors are making. In the DevOps
Handbook, the authors say that after the manufacturing revolution of the
1980s, driven by Lean principles and practices and the Toyota Production
System, “Organizations that did not implement lean practices lost market
share, and many went out of business entirely.”12
So, Agile and Lean are the solutions to all our problems, yes? (Silly
rhetorical question, of course!) No, there is no one perfect process or
solution to solving all our project management problems! There is no one
process that’s a panacea or which provides an easy way out. We have to be
more flexible than that and realize we may have to use multiple processes
and approaches. We’re going to have to mix and match.
More than that, project management is hard work. That is just flat-
out the case. Getting everyone onto the same page and prioritizing and
getting agreement on requirements are hard work. We’re negotiating,
facilitating, communicating, and using all the soft-skill parts of project
management to reach that goal. We’re often working with very power-
ful stakeholders, who outrank us in our own organization or in outside
organizations, and these stakeholders all have different needs, different
wants, and different expectations for the project. This isn’t going to be
easy! There is a lot of pressure to meet very tight schedule constraints and
budget constraints and achieve high quality. No pressure! The emphasis is
clearly on the EQ part of the equation, not the IQ part of the equation.
Agile—by increasing the frequency of communications and by using
“low tech and high touch” communications—is helping in key ways. But
again, it’s not a panacea.
12
The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability and
S ecurity in Technology Organizations— Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois,
John Willis and John Allspaw—Location 515.
Hybrid Projects 29
In the classic PMI® model (defined in the PMBOK® Guide) the PM is

accountable for the project and for making all this happen. In the tradi-
tional or classic scenario, management wants that single point of contact
for the project, or that “one throat to choke!” In the Agile model (espe-
cially with Scrum and XP) the closest role to the PM is the Scrum Master
or the Coach. In Agile, the Scrum Master is not a “large and in-charge
PM” or a traditional, fully accountable PM. The Scrum Master is a “ser-
vant leader” and his or her job is to make life easier for the team members.
Scrum Masters make sure other team members aren’t interrupted and
interfered with during the Sprint/Iteration. So, their job is “to carry food
and carry water!” They are the owners of the methodology and the go-to
person when there are questions about how to best use the methodology.
However, the “team” all together (the developers, the Scrum Master, and
the product owner) is accountable for the project! How can that pos-
sibly work? How can multiple people be accountable? Management is
surely going to want that single point of contact. Yes? (That “one throat to
choke!”) Actually, this can work, and does work, because of the frequency
of communications and the frequent feedback cycles. The idea is that
management (and also the product owner) can wait one to four weeks
for the end of the Sprint/Iteration for the review meeting to inspect the
product increment (deliverable that was created in the Sprint), decide if
this deliverable(s) meets the “definition of done,” and decide whether it
is acceptable. The entire team is accountable for what has been created in
the iteration and what is being demonstrated in the review meeting.
Problem Areas for Agile

Agile is not a perfect solution for all projects. What are some key problem
areas and some key types of projects where Agile is not a good fit, and
why? Here are a few examples to use as a starting point for our next sec-
tion on “How Do We Make Hybrid Approaches Work?”
1. If we do not have the right type of working relationship with our

key stakeholders—the sponsor and other senior managers, cus-
tomer, functional managers, and other stakeholders—then Agile is
not going to work as it should. As was said before, it is best to use
Agile for projects when the customer doesn’t know exactly what they
want starting out in the project, and we need to discover and explore
requirements. Thus, there is a premium being put on creativity.
Therefore, the team needs to be provided a lot of freedom and trust
in exploring what the best solution might be. It follows that Agile is
not going to be the best fit in the following circumstances:
• If there is a lack of trust or working experience with all the
stakeholders and stakeholder groups.
• If the customer and management do not accept that we are in
a “time and materials world” where we need to discover and
explore requirements, then Agile is not going to be the best fit.
Management must understand the benefits of Lean and Agile
and must understand they need to be involved in the review
meetings and the frequent feedback loops for this to work.
If they are insisting on fixed schedule constraints where fixed
detailed design objectives must be met, this is not the right fit.13
• If management thinks Agile is just a nice set of tools for the
developers and programmers that will increase their produc-
13
The acceptance criteria, or “definition of done,” will be more high level (as
in a Dynamic Systems Development Method, DSDM, contract type) than they
would be in a fixed-price (FFP) contract. They will be about high-level functional
requirements, not detailed engineering design requirements. A number of differ-
ent engineering designs could meet the functional, high-level requirements, and
we are entrusting the team to explore and discover the right engineering design.
So, management must be accepting of this. There must be more flexibility, trust,
and tolerance in assessing what meets the definition of done. But we are more
in the world of IKIWISI—“I’ll know it when I see it!” So, management must
understand this well. We can’t start out the project with preconceived notions and
demands for the final detailed engineering design. Also, we can’t have the situa-
tion where we sell the concept of Agile and Lean to management; at the outset of
the project they profess to be quite accepting of this approach, and say they see
the benefits; then, in the middle of the project, “life happens!” Some emergency
comes up, and management quickly reverts back to a classic mindset and insists
on fixed constraints for time and cost, but also fixed scope requirements that are
detailed engineering requirements. This was not the agreement between manage-
ment and the team starting out. We must have a strong relationship between
management and team and know there won’t be such a change in mindset part-
way into the project.
Hybrid Projects 31
tivity and they do not have to get involved, then this is not
going to work. Using Agile will not meet expectations.
• If management doesn’t provide the right culture for the Agile
team members, a “Theory Y type environment,”14 empower-
ing the team and providing a lot of freedom and trust, then
this is not going to work well.15 We will explore this topic
in more depth in the section “How Do We Make Hybrid
Approaches Work?”
14
“Theory X” companies and “Theory X” managers start with the belief that
their employees do not enjoy their job and do not enjoy work. If you start with
that premise, then you will believe your employees will be lazy, careless, ineffi-
cient, and unmotivated. You will have to micromanage them closely to achieve the
right business results. “Theory Y” companies and managers start with the opposite
belief. They believe their employees do enjoy work, want to do a good job, and if
they are provided freedom and trust, they will achieve the right business results.
15
Many Agilists think they invented this enlightened culture of providing free-
dom and trust to the team members (the “Agile Ethos”). They did not! I believe
this culture really started with Hewlett-Packard in 1939 and was a core part of
the “HP Way.” This became the foundation of most companies in Silicon Val-
ley from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s. Walter Isaacson, in his book,
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital
Revolution, describes very well how this culture originated in HP in the early
1940s, and later spread through other Tech companies such as Intel in Silicon
Valley. Bill Hewlett, in defining the HP Way, said, “We believe people want to
do a good job, and we’re going to provide them that opportunity. We are going
to provide them the right environment, but then trust that they will achieve the
right business goals.” … “We believe the people closest to the problem will have
the best solution. We will not micromanage them. We will define the high-level
strategic goals, but empower people closest to the problem to come up with the
right solution.” . . . “We also believe that people are our most valuable resource.”
… “If we succeed as a company, our people should succeed.” They backed this up
with a very enlightened profit-sharing program and employee stock program at a
time when this was almost unheard of. It breaks my heart that in the early 2000s
with new management, very large mergers and acquisitions, much of this amaz-
ing culture began to be dismantled. Other Silicon Valley companies also seemed
to depart from this enlightened model, but the most successful Tech companies
of the past 10 to 15 years, Google and Apple, have kept this culture alive and well.
I think keeping this culture alive was a big part of their success!
• If we are subcontracting much of the project work to ven-

dors, and we have very little past-performance information
for these vendors, then Agile is not a good fit. We will need a
detailed SOW with all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed.
2. Large, complex projects with many stakeholders and stakeholder
groups—difficulty finding the right product owner who can resolve
conflicts.
• Jeff Sutherland describes several projects16 (the FBI Sentinel
Project, Medco, etc.), which were all in crisis and failing, but
in all these projects there were a large number of stakeholders
and stakeholder groups that had disparate needs and wants
that were not compatible, and the projects were stuck in a
deadlocked position. The stakeholders were at loggerheads
about what should be included in the project and what the
priorities should be. One of the first goals in transitioning
to Scrum is to simplify this type of situation. For the FBI
Sentinel project, they reduced the staff from 220 to 40 and
reduced the number of FBI employees on the project from
30 to 12. The next step focused on prioritizing the require-
ments—or the product backlog—and identifying the 20
percent of the requirements that would achieve 80 percent
of the need. Having the right product owner, if that can be
achieved, will definitely help resolve deadlocks in choosing
what should be included in the product backlog and the
priorities of these backlog items. But, on some very large
complex projects, it may be necessary to have multiple prod-
uct owners and, of course, that can present problems too.
Someone has to have the final say and be the decision maker.
And, if the right product owner is not selected, and if senior
management ends up vetoing what the product owner had
previously approved, but only after three or more months
have passed, then we will have wasted a tremendous amount
16
J.J. Sutherland.
Hybrid Projects 33
of time and a lot of money, and Agile didn’t work the way it
was intended.
• So, it might be difficult to find the right product owner (or
“Customer” in XP). A key assumption for Scrum (or for
XP) is that we can find the right product owner, who will
effectively resolve the conflicts between incompatible require-
ments for what will be included in the project and define pri-
orities. But, on a large, complex project with many powerful
stakeholders, it may be very difficult to get agreement and
get all the stakeholders to buy into what the product owner
has decided. Again, as we described earlier, this is the hard
part of project management! Whether it is a PM or a prod-
uct owner striving to get agreement on inconsistent, incom-
patible requirements, this can be a very tough challenge to
handle. Many large, complex projects and programs (F-22,
Affordable Care Act website, etc.) have failed because this
wasn’t handled correctly. No matter what powers have been
given to the product owner, there will be many other stake-
holders on the project (e.g., the sponsor, the customer, other
senior managers, federal regulatory agencies) that outrank
the product owner. The skillsets the product owner must
employ to get everyone onto the same page are “soft skills”:
negotiation skills, communication skills, facilitation skills,
and so on. Following a particular process, or even a method-
ology, will not guarantee success in achieving this goal. This
is about the “EQ” part of the equation, not the “IQ” part!
3. We are in a “cookie-cutter” type project and have successfully done
very similar projects like this one many times before. There were only
small customizations differentiating the projects. (Again, does that
mean this type of project is easy? No!) However, if we are in a “cook-
ie-cutter” type project, it will be far less expensive and more efficient
and practical to use the traditional approach.
• We don’t need to discover and explore requirements: The
customer knows going in exactly what they want for this
project. We need a traditional SOW where all the “I’s are
dotted, and T’s are crossed!” (e.g., A young couple is remod-
eling their kitchen, and the key stakeholder—the wife, of

course!—knows exactly what she wants going in—the make
and models for the different appliances, the exact type of
cabinets and countertops, etc.)
4. We are handling an emergency situation, and there isn’t time to
explore or discover requirements: There isn’t time to prototype.
(There might not be time to canvass all the stakeholders and exhaus-
tively detail all the requirements either!) We may be in the type of sit-
uation where “A less than optimal decision made now—at the right
time—is better than the perfect decision made too late.”
5. We have only one chance to do this project, and we have to get
things right the first time (e.g., again, perhaps an emergency rescue
mission: Apollo 13!).
6. Places where more central control is needed. (The classic PMP®—
fully accountable PM is needed.) Perhaps this could be for an emer-
gency situation or a military operation. There isn’t time to debate
different solutions; we need the team members to follow through on
the plans being disseminated by the PM.
7. If the team members are multitasking on a number of projects at
the same time, are only able to perform very specialized tasks within
their range of expertise, and are only working part-time on the proj-
ect, then Agile probably isn’t the best fit.
8. If the team cannot come up with an “MVP” (minimum viable
product) to demonstrate to the product owner and customer in the
early iterations, Agile is probably not a good fit. For a large, com-
plex project, it might take a development team many months to tie
together all of the infrastructure and hardware before any kind of
recognizable demo or MVP can be made. In the early iterations, it
might only be possible to demonstrate something using prototypes
or models with “fake data.” Engineers and customers could sit side-
by-side with the product owner and customer, discuss the proto-
type, and talk abstractly about what features the customer would
like the real product to have or how they would like to use it. But
then there will often be a large effort and a long period of time to
get a real working product created that is usable by customers. These
“planning phases” of the project could take months, and a predictive
Hybrid Projects 35
planning approach will probably be needed. In this situation, we

cannot effectively use Lean and Agile. We are relegated to using a tra-
ditional, predictive planning approach. When you have an MVP or
demo that uses real customer data, that is the type of project where
you can meet with the customer in the first iterations and effectively
use Lean and Agile.17
Other Key Risks Where Agile Provides Extra Help

It’s a well-known maxim that when projects fail, they fail at the very begin-
ning. We said that having a poorly written scope statement (which stemmed
from not doing requirements well) was the #1 cause of project failure and
was, therefore, our #1 Risk! As we said, this often stems from not doing
requirements well and “not being on the same page” with the customer and
senior management. This is certainly something that hits many projects
right at the very beginning. We saw how using Lean and Agile methodol-
ogies can help us handle this risk. By going after the top priority require-
ments first (20 percent of the requirements that will fulfill 80 percent of the
business need in the first iterations of the project), we are addressing this
risk. By increasing the frequency of the feedback loops and speeding up the
PDCA loop, we are addressing this risk. There are three more key risks that
also occur right at the beginning of projects that Agile can help us solve:
1. Allowing half-baked ideas to survive and not doing “kill points” well
2. Handling “impossible constraints” or dealing with the “impossible
project”
3. Poor communications: not keeping senior management in the loop
and up-to-date on the project18
17
I would like to thank Jason Vorenkamp for providing this important example!
Jason said it was fairly common to run into this issue with a number of IT pro-
jects where they were using Agile.
18
Again, I’m being a little bit lazy in describing these three items all as “risks!”
If any of the items involve uncertainty and are something that could happen in
the future, then they are risks. If the problems have already occurred, they are
no longer risks; they are “issues.” Agile will help us in handling these, no matter
whether they still are risks or are issues.
Risk #2: Allowing Half-Baked Ideas to Survive
If we are worth our salt at all as PMs, we are focusing very heavily on
managing risk. We are doing this at the very start of the project and also
all throughout the project. Risk Management must be focused on, iter-
atively, throughout the project. If we don’t do this, there is no way to
be proactive and no way to issue the favorite type of change request for
PMI®—“Preventive Change Requests.” If our team members are not on
the lookout for triggers of negative risks, then there is no way we will be
able to put into action strategies for avoiding these negative risks, mitigat-
ing negative risks, or transferring negative risks. So, doing Risk Manage-
ment is absolutely fundamental and necessary on all projects.
We are also focusing on risks in a number of different categories and
we are using a risk breakdown structure (RBS) to help us identify risks
in these categories. Early on in my career as a PM, I used an RBS that
started with risks at the top and then, in the next level down, I broke
risks into “internal risks” and “external risks.” So, we can make that type
of structure work fine, but what I prefer, today, is the RBS (Figure 1.9)
Doug DeCarlo uses in his book Extreme Project Management.
The second level in DeCarlo’s RBS is divided between (1) “business
risks,” (2) “product risks” or “technical risks,” (3) “project risks,” and last
(4) “organizational risks.”
Business risks are all about the risks of profit and loss: what senior
managers and our sponsor are most focused on! Is the idea of this project
totally half-baked? Are we going to make a profit, or are we going to lose
our shirt? Is this something that we are good at? How is the economy? Is
this a very tough competitive landscape? Is this a highly regulated mar-
ketplace? We are focusing on those types of questions. Too many times,
companies go after a totally half-baked idea or some senior manager’s
pet project or something that we are really clueless about. This is a very
dangerous situation. If management allows such half-baked ideas to sur-
vive, then very valuable resources and funding are being taken from other
much more deserving projects. This can even lead to the downfall of
the entire company! So, we need to find out about the validity of
a project idea very early on in the game and kill the project if it is a
half-baked idea.
Hybrid Projects 37
Risks
Business Products/ Project

Organizational
Risks Deliverables Risks
Bus. Benefit Functions/ Schedule

Rqmts Clear? Politics
Clear? Constraints?
Quality/ Accept. Budget

Competition? Crit. Clear? Stakeholders
Constraints?
Customer Needs Technical PM

Identified? Virtual Team?
Challenges? Experience?
Team Resources
Economy
Available?
Figure 1.9 The risk breakdown structure (RBS)
By the way, if we are asked to manage a project that is totally half-

baked, is this mostly a risk just for senior management and the sponsor or
is this a big risk for us, too? Again, an obviously rhetorical question! Of
course, this is a huge risk for us as PMs. This project is certainly bound to
fail, and when it fails, who is going to take the blame? Who is going to be
looking for a new job? You know the answer, and it’s not the sponsor who
came up with the half-baked idea.
Before I move on to talk more about business risks and half-baked
ideas, let’s talk briefly about the other three major categories of risk in this
RBS. The second category—product risks or technical risks—is focusing
on questions such as “Do we have the resources and skill sets to create
the product with the right quality?” Are the requirements and the quality
metrics for these products clearly defined and specified; are they SMART?
The third category—project risks—is primarily focusing on constraints.
How tightly constrained is this project? Are there very tough budget con-
straints, schedule constraints, or resource constraints? Have we correctly
identified the priorities of the triple constraints? Also, do we have the
right PM with the right experience? The last category—organizational
risks—is all about political risk. We are creating something new and
unique. Yes? That is what a project is all about: creating either a new
product, a new service, or a result. That’s the definition of a project in the
PMBOK® Guide.
So, is everyone in our organization in favor of this project, this new
thing we are trying to create? Of course not! Some people are losing power
and influence because of our project. They are not in favor of this proj-
ect at all. Many people resist change and just don’t understand change.
They are saying things like, “What was wrong with the way we used to
do things?” or “I like the old way!” They are not in favor of this proj-
ect, either. So, when we created our Stakeholder Management strategies,
we should have focused on these stakeholders and tried to put together
strategies to turn the more negative stakeholders into supporters of the
project, or at least neutralize the negativity.
Back to “half-baked ideas”—“kill points” and handling business
risks …
When I obtained my PMP® certification in 1995, the requirements
for contact hours, or education hours, were more stringent for the PMP®
certification. Therefore, HP sent me to a two-day conference on project
management held at Boston University, so I could obtain the necessary
contact hours. There were more than 25 different presentations delivered
(some simultaneously in different rooms) over the two days, and prizes
were awarded for the best papers. The first prize went to Ten Dumb Mis-
takes That Project Managers Make by Gopal Kapur. The number one mis-
take that he listed was “Allowing half-baked ideas to survive.”
Classically, when product managers and the business development team
are working with senior managers to do project selection, they are using
financial selection techniques such as net present value (NPV), internal
rate of return (IRR), opportunity costs, pay-back period, economic value
add (EVA), and other methods to see what project will have the greatest
return on investment (ROI). Mr. Kapur’s point was that all too often, these
techniques are only used once to select a project out of a possible group
of projects, and then management never reanalyzes things or re-examines
things to determine if the business case still exists for the project. His point
was that this should be done multiple times through the course of the
Hybrid Projects 39
project lifecycle. (Perhaps this should be done at the end of every phase to
see if we think we will still get the best ROI with the project.)
As we move through every step of planning, we are progressively elab-
orating and decomposing high-level business requirements and functional
requirements down to more detailed products, and more detailed prod-
ucts down to parts and components, and parts and components down
to specific activities. Therefore, we can obtain much better estimates of
time and cost each step of the way and also improve our forecasts for the
project. These better estimates and forecasts should be fed back into the
financial analysis techniques, so we can determine if the business case still
exists. Many companies do not do this at all or do not do it well, and this
can lead to immense problems. We want to ensure that we aren’t attempt-
ing to create something “half-baked” that has very little chance of being
on-time, within budget, and having the desired value for our customer.
In Figure 1.10, we are showing kill points occurring regularly as we
move through the project phases.
Agile is helping the product owner, senior management, and the team
accomplish the “kill points” in a much more effective way. First, the kill
points can occur much earlier and much more frequently. Review meet-
ings with the product owner and management are occurring at minimum
on a monthly basis, but oftentimes are occurring much more frequently
than that. Management and other stakeholders are encouraged to come
by the area where the team is working on a frequent basis to review the
“information radiator” that displays the burndown chart, a Kanban
Board, and other key information on the project’s progress, so they can
discuss the project and ask questions.
More than that, something empirical and tangible is being produced
in each iteration, and as we’ve said this is much more valuable than only
producing dashboard reports displaying S-curves, network diagrams,
Gantt charts, or other forecasts. When we’re in the type of project where
the customer doesn’t know exactly what they want going into the project
and we need to explore and discover the best solution, providing some-
thing empirical that the product owner can touch, experiment with, and
use will be especially valuable. Again, we could be in the world of “I’ll
know it when I see it”—or IKIWISI!
Phases Detailed Coding/ Unit Integrated

Conceptual Design Development Testing Testing
‘Phase gates’ and ‘Kill points’ occur as we

move from phase to phase.
Figure 1.10 Project lifecycle (divide the project into phases)
Risk #3: Impossible Constraints
A type of risk closely related to the problem of a project dealing with a

“half-baked idea” is the problem of dealing with the “impossible project.”
I think all PMs have been put in the situation where the sales team has
thrown a new project over the fence to them with an impossible sched-
ule constraint; or similarly, senior management imposes upon them an
impossible budget constraint for a project. (These risks fit into the cat-
egory of “project risk” in our earlier RBS.) Unfortunately, all too often,
the sales people and the management team did not bring the PM into the
presales process fully and did not ask for the PM’s opinion early on for fig-
uring out what was realistic for the project and what could be achieved. In
today’s world where the competitive bar has been set very high, customers
are more fickle than ever, and the marketplace is changing so fast it makes
your head spin. This scenario is far too common! PMs are being asked to
manage the “impossible project!”
The PM is left wondering, “What were they thinking, and how in the
heck did they expect that this project could get done?” “I wish they would
come and try managing this project!” When the senior manager asks the
PM, “Now, you can get this project successfully completed. Yes?” “You can
get this project completed on time and within budget. Yes?” What’s the
right answer? Is it, “Sir, yes Sir!” “I know you have given us a very chal-
lenging schedule here, and of course, not all the resources we would like
to have, but I am very confident in our team, and I know the team and I
will be successful in meeting your goals!” And then, “At this moment, I’m
Hybrid Projects 41
not quite sure how we will pull this off, but with hard work, I know we
can succeed, and we will succeed!” Is this the right answer? Of course not!
Management does not need some Pollyanna, glib answer; they do not need
a yes-man to tell them what they want to hear. That isn’t going to do them
any good at all. They do need some type of reality check and good advice
on what can realistically be expected with the project. So, what is the right
answer? (And this answer applies to either the traditional waterfall model or
the Agile model.) The answer is, “I don’t know yet!” “We need to do some
more planning and investigation to determine what can be accomplished,
and in what time frames, and for what cost.” “The team and I will do this
more detailed planning, but I will get back to you soon with much better
estimates of time and cost for what we are confident we can accomplish.”
What would our approach be using a traditional waterfall project life-
cycle? As we said before, we would just follow the sequence of planning
processes that are laid out in the first Knowledge Areas in the PMBOK®
Guide. As we’ve already described, we would take the initial description
of what product or service best meets the business need from the project
charter, plus the initial estimates of time, cost, resources, and risk, and we
would start drilling into more detail. We would do the process, Collect
Requirements, very well, ensuring that we did not miss any requirements,
misunderstand any requirements, or miss any stakeholders. We would
then do the process, Define Scope, and define boundaries and exclusions
for our deliverables and make sure that everyone is on the same page
for this project. However, we wouldn’t stop there. We would keep going
deeper into what PMI® loves best: Create WBS. Then, we would go down
to the activity level with our scheduling processes. All along, we’ve been
improving time estimates and cost estimates for budgeting. Each step of
the way through planning, we are drilling into more and more detail: we
break down high-level requirements into specific deliverables, then down
to parts and then to components of parts; we will know … resources
much better, so we can provide much better estimates of time and cost.
On a large, complex project, how long is this going to take? Probably
several months at minimum!
Is management going to be patient with us over these months, wait-
ing to get the better estimates of time and cost? Of course not! They are
knocking on our door every few days demanding these better estimates.
We are doing our best to oblige, using estimating techniques described in
the PMBOK® Guide—Analogous Estimating, Bottom-Up Estimating, Para-

metric Estimating, and Three-Point Estimating. As we move through the
sequence of these planning processes described above, we are understand-
ing our products and deliverables in more detail each step of the way,
breaking things down to the part level, component level, and then the
activity level, so each step of the way we can obtain more accurate esti-
mates of time and cost. In addition, we will use the analytic techniques
described in the process, Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis, by first obtain-
ing probability distributions for time and cost for work-packages or even
the activities in the schedule, and then using Monte Carlo simulation
to mathematically determine the right level of contingency reserves that
should be included with activities that will roll up to the schedule baseline
and the cost baseline to help protect the project from risk. Therefore, we
will be able to get a more accurate forecast of when this project is likely to
finish and a more accurate budget forecast. Alternatively, we may choose
to use EMV to refine the contingency reserves.
Using these estimating methods and other analytic tools and tech-
niques, we will have created a very impressive network diagram show-
ing the dependencies between the thousands of activities in the project,
the critical path for the project, and the float for all the activities in the
network diagram. Using Monte Carlo, we could create a very impres-
sive S-curve19 showing a probability distribution of projected costs for
the project, and then we could explain to management what this implies
for our level of confidence of meeting certain schedule objectives and
cost objectives. We could create a tornado diagram that shows what
work-packages are most sensitive to what risks. Doing all this planning
and creating all these charts that took months and months can be very
seductive, and create some very impressive charts and documents. But,
how accurate and how reliable will all these charts be? How accurate will
our forecasts be? In our modern project world, with so much change and
volatility, it is very rare that these will be accurate. As Jeff Sutherland
describes in his book on Scrum,
See Figure 1.11 which provides an example of an S-curve. An explanation of

19
an S-curve is also provided.

Hybrid Projects 43
It’s just so tempting to draw up endless charts. All the work needed to
be done on a massive project laid out for everyone to see—but when
detailed plans meet reality, they fall apart. Build into your working
method the assumption of change, discovery, and new ideas.
Several other excellent quotes also bear on this subject:
• “To fail to plan is to plan to fail.” Yes, very true, but also…
• “Planning is useful. Blindly following plans is stupid!”
• “Planning for combat is important, but as soon as the first
shot is fired, your plans go up in smoke.”—Dwight
Eisenhower
• “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”—Helmuth von
Moltke the Elder (Prussian General)
In an interesting book, The Six Dimensions of Project Management: Turn-

ing Constraints into Resources by Michael Dobson and Heidi Feickert, the
authors describe how we can sometimes solve the “impossible project”
by figuring out which of our triple constraints has the highest priority,
which is second in priority, and which is third, and then, using creativity
and one’s imagination and by being proactive, we might be able to exploit
one of these constraints or project assumptions. They point out examples
of situations where it was assumed something was a fixed constraint, but
by being proactive, using creativity, and thinking “out of the box,” it was
discovered there were assumptions buried in the constraint, and using
creativity, the assumptions could be changed and the supposed constraint
could also be changed. The constraints weren’t really constraints after all!
This should be reminiscent of the Standish survey, and the point made
previously about requirements: “65 percent of the requirements the cus-
tomer thinks are absolutely necessary will never be used!” In our projects,
it often turns out that requirements that were thought to be absolutely
necessary are found not to be needed.
Therefore, Agile methodologies will provide a much more effective
and faster solution for probing what is really an assumption and what is a
constraint.20 By going after the highest priority requirements in our first

iterations (the 20 percent of the requirements that will fulfill 80 percent
of the need) and also the requirements with the most risk, and then by
creating something tangible and empirical that can be demonstrated to
the product owner (and the customer and other senior managers), we
should be able to solve problems with impossible constraints much more
effectively. We will see very early in the project what has value and what
does not. Things that don’t have value will be taken out of the product
backlog, and we will not invest in them further. As we said before, this
is going to save time and money. Demonstrating something tangible and
empirical to our key stakeholders also provides a much stronger reality
check on the value of what’s being created. (Doug DeCarlo’s quote: “If a
picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pic-
tures!”) As we saw in the Medco example earlier, using Scrum, or another
Agile methodology, and using Lean approaches can solve the problem
with handling an impossible constraint. Even if we find out that what we
are trying to achieve is truly impossible, and this cannot be accomplished
in the right time frame for the right budget, and meet mandatory scope
and quality requirements, then at least we have determined that very early
in the project, in the first iterations. We can provide the product owner
and senior management the information they need to make an informed
decision on whether or not they should cancel this project. That may be
the best thing to do in a number of cases. The project team may be very
discouraged with this outcome, but it might be the best choice for the
company. Increasing the frequency of the feedback loops and speeding up
20
By the way, the pure definition of a constraint for PMI® is “Constraints are
things that are given to us from the outside, and limit our options for planning.”
These are things that are known or are facts. There are six classic constraints:
scope, time, cost, resources, risk, and quality. Or… We can have constraints in
any of the six areas. For PMI®, in contrast, assumptions are things that we assume
to be true for the time being that will guide planning. At the beginning of my
project, I often make assumptions about resources, and what training is required
for my resources, or what tools and equipment will be required for my resources.
I may assume going into the project that my resources won’t need more train-
ing or won’t need new software or new tools. We always need to re-examine our
assumptions as we are moving through the project.
Hybrid Projects 45
the PDCA loop also help management in making better decisions with
the kill points. As we said previously, many companies don’t do these “kill
points” very well, and this can lead to huge problems.
Even while using traditional project management approaches, the
importance of getting off to a good start is well known. In the literature,
it’s well understood that the number one risk we face is not getting off to
a good start, not obtaining requirements in the right way, and not hav-
ing a well-written scope statement with boundaries and exclusions and
SMART acceptance criteria for our deliverables.
EVM which, as we’ve said, is very consistent with traditional water-
fall project management also understands this very well. In Fleming and
Koppelman’s book, Simple Earned Value on All Projects (Simplified Transla-
tions of the 27 EVM Criteria), they point out that it’s most important to
use EV, get the key measurements of schedule variance (SV), cost variance
(CV), cost performance index (CPI), and schedule performance index
(SPI), and also get our forecasts, estimate at completion (EAC), and esti-
mate to completion (ETC) very early in the project lifecycle. We really
need to get these EV measurements no later than 15 to 20 percent into
the project schedule.21 It’s only at that point where we have some hope
of making the necessary corrections to save the project! If we are more
than one-third of the way through the project, and we discover that CPI
is significantly below one (e.g., 0.8), then it’s too late to make the cor-
rections. To-complete performance index (TCPI) will be some number
like 1.2, which is saying we need to make a 40 percent improvement in
our budget performance to get back to the original budget, the original
BAC. That is not possible, and there is a “small chance out of no chance”
of that happening! They point out that there is a wealth of data on federal
programs—many of them large DoD programs—where it is shown that
once you’re more than 15 percent through the project schedule, it’s next
21
“Using data from a sample of completed Air Force contracts, Christensen/
Payne establish that the cumulative CPI did not change by more than 10% from
the value at the 20% contract completion point. Based on data from the Defense
acquisition executive summary (DAE S) database, results indicate that the cumu-
lative CPI is stable from the 20% completion point regardless of contract type,
program, or service.” p. 41.
to impossible to make more than a 5 or 8 percent improvement in CPI or

the budget performance. So, to be useful for us, EVM must be used very
early on in the project lifecycle.
Agile methodologies are providing the same type of performance
measurements very early in the project lifecycle, even in our first itera-
tions, using burndown charts and burnup charts. These are much more
intuitive and easier to understand than the EVM dashboard, which is
typically an S-curve showing all the EVM variables—planned value (PV),
earned value (EV), actual cost (AC), Budget at Completion (BAC)—and
also showing forecasts—estimate at completion (EAC) and estimate to
completion (ETC). There are few senior managers who will understand
the intricacies of such an S-curve, but almost anyone is quickly going to
grasp what a burndown chart is indicating and will be able to make the
appropriate inferences to see when we’re going to end up with this project.
A Classic S-Curve Chart
A classic S-curve chart22 is given in Figure 1.11 and a classic burndown

chart in Figure 1.12.
The dashed line on the burndown chart is showing us our plan for
creating work or creating story points. Thus, the descending dashed line
is showing us the remaining PV in the project or in the release. The solid
line is showing us the work we’ve actually created, or story points actually
created, so this is showing us EV (actually, the remaining EV as the line
descends). AC is also easy to derive as the costs for each iteration are fixed,
since these are essentially the labor costs for each iteration. Though we
22
In EVM, the cost baseline is usually represented as an S-Curve: a time-phased
budget or a curve showing the cumulative spend-rate for the project. In a classic
waterfall project, the costs start out low in the early phases of a project. (We have
fewer people working on the project in the early planning phases, and a lower use
of tools and equipment.) During the “execution phase(s),” costs start accelerat-
ing, and typically, in the middle of the execution phases, the project experiences
its highest spend-rate. Then as work is completed, the resources doing the work
can be released, so the spend-rate for the project begins to decline. This “time-
phased” budget or cost baseline is an “S” lying on its side. In EVM, this is called
the “performance measurement baseline.”
Hybrid Projects 47
ETC = EAC – AC ETC = 389,481 ? EAC = 519,481

= 519,481 – 130,000 ? EAC = BAC/CPI
= 389,481
CPI = EV/AC
$400,000 = 100,000/130,000
= .77
EAC = BAC/CPI
= 400,000/.77
Cost
$$ (BAC)
$400,000
$130,000 AC = $130,000
$120,000 PV = $120,000
$100,000 EV = $100,000
Week 1 Week 3 Week 10

Time
Figure 1.11 Cost baseline = a classic “S-curve”
didn’t show it, this would be a diagonal line running from the bottom
left to the upper right (the opposite direction of the dashed line). To stay
consistent with the theme of the burndown chart, we could make the AC
line a descending line that is showing us costs remaining in the project.
Again, the costs should be fixed for the project or the release.
Shows the team and management how we are trending in getting

work accomplished against our plan
May hide Scope Creep! Was the flatter performance between
June and July due to performance, or increased scope?
Burndown Chart for “Introduction to Agile” Class Update Project
250
200
Story Points 150
Planned (Ideal)
100
Actual
50
0
March April May June July August Sept
All Rights Reserved Best Practices Team, LLC January 9, 2019
Figure 1.12 Burndown chart

Risk #4: Poor Communications: Not Keeping Senior Management

in the Loop and Up-to-Date on the Project
As PMs, we all know how important it is to do communications very

well on our projects. Our most important skillset as a PM is commu-
nications skills. As we’ve said, a huge part of this is good listening skills:
“All good communicators are necessarily good listeners.” A big part of
good communications and good listening skills is paying close attention
to all the “undercurrents” involved in the communications—all the body
language. Again, I think 90 percent of good project management is really
about emotional intelligence—the “EQ part of the equation,” not the
technical part or the “IQ part of the equation.” For almost every project
I’ve encountered that was failing and in crisis, there were serious commu-
nications problems.
What does senior management—and the customer, too—hate most?
Surprises! Negative surprises! But not keeping them up-to-date on the
progress and the good things happening with our project is also a danger-
ous mistake, especially not updating our sponsor. If we have not kept her
in the loop on progress being made and our success, then “out of sight
is out of mind.” Other priorities might have come up, and she might
have shifted her focus elsewhere. We might find she has decided to shift
resources or funding from our project to something new.
On a critical project I managed at HP—one of those “impossible
projects”—in our internal kickoff meeting, the sponsor said to the team,
“It will not be enough to just communicate well on this project, we must
‘over-communicate!’” So, what did he mean? This project was a special
project with an incredibly demanding go-live date, $80 million plus at
stake, a very difficult external customer to keep happy, a very large num-
ber of key stakeholders, other business units inside of HP,—and also key
vendors to whom we had subcontracted major portions of the project.
How many times in your project do you believe you have done all the
necessary things to get agreement between key stakeholders on an import-
ant date, or a requirement, or item, or decision, and things still went
wrong? You ensured minutes were taken of the meeting where the agree-
ment was achieved, and the minutes documented that everyone agreed
with several key decisions. The minutes were disseminated properly to all
Hybrid Projects 49
the key parties soon after the meeting, and yet, somehow, things still did
not go smoothly. You asked all the attendees of the meeting to review the
minutes and report back by the end of the next day with any corrections
or edits. Then, a few weeks later, a key stakeholder says, “No, I didn’t say
that.” … or … “That is not exactly what I meant.” Sometimes, when we
get the answer, “Yes,” on a key point, we need to double-check with that
stakeholder a few days later, and make sure the answer is still yes! I believe
this is what the sponsor meant by saying, “We must over-communicate.”
This is probably not necessary on all projects, but at some time in your
career as a PM, it will be!
In Gopal Kapur’s presentation, Ten Dumb Mistakes Project Managers
Make, the number one mistake was allowing “half-baked ideas to sur-
vive.” The number two mistake was not keeping your sponsor and other
key stakeholders in the loop with key status information on the project.
He termed this, “Overlooking stakeholders, forgetting the champions,
and ignoring the nemesis.”
We have already seen how Agile really helps in key ways with improv-
ing communications for our project. We’ve described that with using
Agile:
1. We are communicating with the product owner, customer, and other
key stakeholders much more frequently.
• Review meetings are occurring, at minimum, on a monthly
basis, but collaboration with the key stakeholders is expected
to be occurring more frequently than that.
2. Communications between all team members are occurring much
more frequently.
• Daily standup meetings with the team members are an excel-
lent tool for improving communications. Every team mem-
ber gets to hear how things are going with all the other team
members, what problems they’re facing, and what progress
they’re making. When they hear of a problem another team
member is having, it is likely that one of the team members
is going to have some suggestions. This is taken off-line, and
not handled in the standup meeting, but this will very likely
help improve progress for the project.
• Retrospective meetings that are held at minimum in each

iteration are also excellent tools for improving communica-
tions and improving the team chemistry. At heart, these are
just “lessons learned meetings.” These retrospective meetings
are for the team members and ways for them to improve
their processes: At the end of each Sprint (Iteration), they
are asking, “What worked well?” … “What didn’t work
so well?” … “What should we do differently in the next
Sprint?”
• The frequency of the “feedback loops” is dramatically
increased. Agile is speeding up the PDCA loop, and this is
speeding up communications.
3. We are demonstrating tangible, empirical “product increment” to
the stakeholders. This is more compelling and powerful than just
reporting our project dashboard in “S-curves,” progress reports, sta-
tus reports, forecasts, or other EVM reports.
4. The Agile reports—“the information radiator”—is “low tech” and
“high touch.” These reports such as a burndown chart, burnup chart,
Kanban Board, and reports showing the team’s velocity are intuitive
and easily understood. It’s a very rare customer or senior manager
who understands all the vagaries and details in an EVM S-curve.
On the other hand, they will readily understand a burndown chart,
Kanban Board, or report showing velocity.
5. What management cares most about are our forecasts. They do care
about our variances, our CPI, and where we are today with the proj-
ect, but the question most on their mind is, “When will you really be
done?” … and of course, “How much is this project really going to
cost when it’s all said and done?” That is the reason Cost Forecasts are
the most important output of Control Costs, and Schedule Forecasts
are the most important output of Control Schedule in the PMBOK®
Guide. It is far easier to forecast using a burndown chart or burnup
chart, than to do forecasting with Monte Carlo or EVM.
6. Using dedicated teams that are colocated will improve communica-
tions in very significant ways. If the team is colocated, what did we
just get rid of? Phone tag! Delays and waiting for responses to email
messages! Also, how many times have you received an email from a
Hybrid Projects 51
key stakeholder where you thought everything was under control

and you were on the same page, together, regarding the project. You
read this email, and it’s obvious that you’re not on the same page. You
are reading the email, and parts of it are very confusing and obscure.
You’re wondering why they said things the way that they did, and
you know there’s some type of problem, but you’re not really sure
what that problem is.
In the world in which I managed projects, it’s very unlikely that I’m in the
same office with this stakeholder. I’m going to have to pick up the phone
and, hopefully, get them on the phone right away, and try to get to the
bottom of this problem. But, more times than not, I’ll reach their voice-
mail, and I’ll have to leave a message. Then, I’ll be quite frustrated—for
at least several hours until we can get to the bottom of things. If I’m in an
Agile environment where the entire team is colocated, I can just get up
out of my chair, go find this stakeholder, and we will quickly get to the
bottom of things. What’s the key factor that’s really going to help me cut
through any possible confusion and nonsense? Being able to see the body
language of this other stakeholder is key. Being able to see their expres-
sions and hear the tone of their voice will be vital in ensuring that we are
on the same page. In a classic Agile environment, I can get all of that. As
Susan Parente discusses in the chapter on “Virtual Agile Teams,” we will
need good tools like Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, JoinMe,
Adobe Connect, and Skype so the team can meet virtually, but still have
video and audio real-time connection with each other.
How Do We Make Hybrid Approaches Work?

Hopefully, most of the project management world has embraced Agile
today and understands the need for its use in solving modern project
management problems. Agile is the “elephant in the room” for doing
project management. Yet, there is still a need and a place for using the
tried-and-true traditional waterfall approach as well. Waterfall shouldn’t
be discarded and forgotten. But now, the hard part comes! How can we
marry these two approaches and effectively use them together in projects
and programs? I don’t think this is going to be easy!
Many people in the Agile community think of “hybrid projects” in

quite a negative way. They think a hybrid approach corrupts Agile and,
therefore, should not be used. They would say if you attempt to mix Scrum
and waterfall, you won’t get “Scrum + water + fall,” instead you will get
“Scrum + water + fail!”23 In large part, I don’t disagree! If you attempt to
use Scrum and waterfall/predictive approaches within the same portion of
a project (or subproject; e.g., use Scrum, but also try to use a Gantt chart
to define the critical path and schedule24 for the next six to nine months),
you will likely fail. But if you completely separate the waterfall/predictive
pieces of the project (or subprojects) from the Scrum/Agile pieces and
handle each independently of each other, then I think this can work and
it makes sense to do so. In fact, it is often going to be necessary. In my
experience, management within my own company would not allow me
to use Scrum or Agile on all projects or (subprojects). It would be far too
expensive. They would not support having dedicated teams of 5 to 10
senior engineers or “generalizing specialists” on all parts of my projects.
Again, that would be far too expensive and impractical. I’m going to have
to work hard to get their buy-in to use Scrum or another Agile method
on some high-priority subprojects or portions of projects. Also, I’m going
to have to work hard to educate them that, for these subprojects, they are
going to have to be much more involved and they are also going to have
to support a new culture.
Yet, this might be a hard sell to both the Agilists in our organiza-
tion and those who favor the traditional approach. Some Agilists say
that a company cannot adopt Agile halfway or part way and, therefore,
can’t allow for “hybrid projects.” It’s an “all or none affair.” If you try
to immediately use a hybrid approach, you will risk failing at adopting
Agile. Your “Agile project” will fail, but it wasn’t a defect in the Agile
methodology, it was a failure in the way in which it was implemented.
23
See “What Is Hybrid Agile”—https://vitalitychicago.com/blog/what-is-hybrid-
agile/
24
To be precise, we would use a “Network Diagram”— such as an Activity on
Node (AON) Network Diagram—to show the critical path. A Gantt chart, in its
original formulation, is only a bar chart and doesn’t show dependencies or logic
between activities like the AON diagram.
Hybrid Projects 53
The Agilists will say this is almost like converting to a new religion and
something we must do for the whole company! Obviously, that’s very
hard to do and it will be difficult for the organization to make this trans-
formation. Jim Highsmith, one of the key authors of Agile articles and
books, says, “Stop doing Agile. Start being Agile!” I believe a big part
of what he means is that it’s a mistake to adopt some pieces of Scrum
and other Agile approaches (e.g., incorporating daily standup meetings,
having an information radiator, calling your requirements the “Product
Backlog”), but not fully embracing the entire Agile approach and cul-
ture. Of course, he means that the entire company must do this! He also
means don’t follow Scrum practices halfway, or in name only. Doing so
is called being Agile in name only (AINO); yes, it is so common there
is an acronym for it! In other words, don’t do daily standup meetings,
but make the daily standup meeting the same as the traditional weekly
status meeting. Don’t say you are going to adopt Agile, but then require
that the traditional PMO policies stipulating the team must use MS
Project to build a network diagram and define the critical path stay in
place. (Don’t do this for the parts of the project where you are using
Agile.) Don’t require all the normal project documents (all 30+ project
documents defined in the Version Six PMBOK® Guide!) such as a risk
register, stakeholder register, and issue log be developed. Yes, some may
be needed, but these should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If they
are needed, it should be because they provide value to the customer,
which includes whether they are needed to meet regulations or standards
the customer requires.
Far too many people say they are using Agile and they are totally
on board with it, but then it turns out they are using it halfway or in
a corrupted manner. So, the risk of this occurring is even greater when
we venture out to use hybrid approaches. There is a real danger that we
will not get the “best of both worlds,” and instead get the “worst of both
worlds!” Yet, there is a danger of this happening no matter what project
management approach or methodology we use! PMs are always finding
ways to not do communications well, not run meetings well, not obtain
requirements, not plan well, not treat the team members well, or not pay
attention to important contract obligations, and so on. Trying to follow a
particular process or a methodology won’t guarantee anything!
However, using a hybrid approach is about finding optimum ways of:
• Communicating well with our team members and customers

• Running efficient and effective meetings
• Obtaining requirements that add value for our customers
• Soundly planning and executing to deliver on features that
add value to the customer
• Treating team members and other project stakeholders well,
prioritizing them over processes and procedures
• Paying attention to important contract obligations, while
effectively collaborating with the customer
There are two different ways of referring to hybrid Agile projects:
1. The first approach is not controversial, and it refers to mixing dif-

ferent Agile methodologies such as Scrum and XP within one proj-
ect. This topic is worthy of a long discussion, and in fact, today,
there is plenty of discussion on using hybrid approaches by scaling
Agile methodologies throughout the enterprise, especially within
programs. Two of the most popular frameworks for scaling Agile in
a hybrid way are Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and Disciplined
Agile Delivery (DAD). These frameworks are primarily focused on
scaling Agile methodologies for software and IT projects and defin-
ing processes for using Scrum, XP, Lean, Kanban, and DevOps.
However, a number of authors think SAFe and DAD impose too
much structure, are too prescriptive, and therefore, are too restric-
tive. (For example, Googling “Does SAFe Agile impose too much
structure” results in a number of articles that argue for this position.)
Again, no one process or methodology fits all situations, and these
frameworks may take away the freedom that project teams need for
determining the right methodology in the right situation.
Another objection that is often voiced is the idea that teams
should give one methodology, for example, Scrum, a good nine
months or longer before venturing out and mixing in other Agile
methodologies. Key authors of Agile/Scrum articles say, “Yes, Scrum
is easy to adopt, but it’s hard to perfect and excel in using.” So, give
Hybrid Projects 55
it a good try on its own with the basic team roles along with the
basic meetings and rituals before venturing out and adding any other
elements.
Lastly, I find it very interesting that neither SAFe nor DAD allows
for integrating traditional waterfall approaches within the hybrid
framework. Why wouldn’t they allow for that? If some projects or
parts of projects involve work we’ve done many times before and for
which we have very good historical records of time and cost—if the
customer knows in detail exactly what they want starting out—won’t
it be less expensive and more efficient to use a traditional waterfall
approach for these parts? I think the answer is clearly, “Yes!” I think
many of our projects, today, are large enough and complex enough
that parts of the projects are work-packages that we have done many
times before, and these parts are “cookie-cutter.” It will be simpler,
less expensive, and faster to handle these cookie-cutter parts with
a traditional waterfall approach. We will expand on this discussion
throughout this book.
2. The second meaning of “hybrid project management” is jointly using
an Agile approach with a traditional waterfall approach within the
same project, and this is the controversial topic. Can this be handled
effectively? What are the key obstacles and challenges? As I’ve said,
many people in the Agile community think it is foolish to attempt
to do this! I think it is necessary in many corporate environments,
today, and we need to find ways to make it work. I would like to
argue that as long as the Agile components are kept separate from
the traditional/predictive components, then this can work. What are
the main difficulties? Let’s go through the “Problem Areas for Agile”
that we described in the previous section, and see how some of these
problems map into managing a hybrid project, mixing components
that are Agile with components being handled in a traditional/pre-
dictive way.
• First and foremost, we said the right stakeholder relation-
ships and culture in the organization must exist to support
Agile. Agile is not as much a project management meth-
odology for how to best obtain requirements and divide
a project into phases or stages as it is a new culture and
mindset. To just make Agile work successfully on its own,

as we’ve described, a culture of freedom and trust must be
provided to the team members. Senior management must
buy into this idea, understand they have a key role to play,
and get at least a basic education in Agile. They must realize
that they will need to be much more involved than they
would in a traditional (waterfall) environment. So, to make
hybrid work, where both programs and projects contain both
traditional pieces and Agile pieces, is going to be even more
challenging. I think it’s going to be paramount to provide
this “Agile culture” or “Agile mindset” across the entire
hybrid project or program, not just the Agile pieces. It would
be impractical and even offensive to handle some parts of
the project or program with an entirely different manage-
ment approach than other parts. Again, senior management
and the entire company must be supportive and buy in to
this idea. Also, everyone must understand it’s a mistake to
mix the two approaches together on the same subproject or
portion of a project.
It may seem overly idealistic and utopian to provide this
type of culture company wide, but it is very possible. In fact,
many Tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Intel are
doing this today. They are providing this culture of the “Agile
mindset” throughout the company: in programs, projects,
and even for operational functions.
Allowing for much freedom and trust for employees
doesn’t simply imply that one person’s ideas are as good as
everyone else’s, that the employees are free to do whatever
they want, or work on whatever they want! No, quite the
contrary. It’s understood that striving for value is paramount
and we will use Lean techniques to quickly identify waste and
remove it from the product backlog or work assignments. By
using Agile and Lean, we are focusing even more efficiently
on achieving value and eliminating waste than we would in a
traditional company structure.
Hybrid Projects 57
If the company’s culture is to use Scrum (or another Agile

methodology) on all projects, then it might be difficult to sell
the idea of being flexible and allow some projects—or parts of
projects—to use a traditional approach. Both senior manage-
ment and the project management team members themselves
might be pretty resistant to that idea. Likewise, if the company
culture or the PMO culture is to use a waterfall approach and
EVM on all projects, then it could be difficult to sell people
on the idea of integrating in Agile for some projects or parts
of projects. But, as I’ve said multiple times, it makes sense to
be open-minded to this. We should recognize that there isn’t
one perfect process or approach for solving all problems. For
almost any type of job, we have to learn what’s the best tool
and for what situation. So, everyone on the hybrid project
needs to get basic training in the Agile method being used,
and also basic training in the nuts and bolts of traditional
project management and why it is still necessary, today. We
need to send senior managers to this training, also!
• How do we organize all the different components in the
hybrid program/project? How do we ensure the Agile com-
ponents are managed separately from the traditional compo-
nents, but all the pieces are integrated together cohesively?
As we’ve described, many of our modern projects are big
enough and complex enough that some parts of the project
(some work-packages, if you will) are cookie-cutter, and it
makes perfect sense to use the traditional waterfall approach
for these parts. As we mentioned earlier, it’s going to be less
expensive and more efficient to let the classic fully empow-
ered PM run the show, be accountable for all planning, all
executing, and all monitoring and controlling. This PM will
hand out parts of the PM plan to individuals on the team,
will ensure they execute against the plan, and will also be
accountable for measuring variance, measuring progress, and
doing forecasting. Having a colocated team of 5 to 10 senior
individuals dedicated to the project is a much more expen-
sive option. This is especially true when we know, going in,

exactly what the customer wants.
However, for the parts of the project where the customer
does not know exactly what they want when starting out—
and, there will be a premium on discovering requirements and
a premium on creativity—one of the Agile approaches would
be best. (This is also true for projects where some of the other
risks we have discussed apply: “handling the half-baked idea”
and “handling impossible constraints!”)
How can we best integrate different approaches in a hybrid
model? Ken Schwaber, in his book Agile Project Management
with Scrum, describes an ingenious way of using Scrum all by
itself for fairly large, complex projects. If we have a project
that’s large enough where we are going to need 50—or even
more—project team members, then he says divide the proj-
ect into multiple Scrum teams and divide the project work
between these different teams. Then, to integrate and coordi-
nate all this work and handle dependencies, have a represen-
tative from each Scrum team meet with the other teams in a
“Scrum of Scrums” meeting. His graphic for this “Scrum of
Scrums” meeting looks something like that in Figure 1.13.
The Scrum of Scrums meetings may function in a very similar way to the
“daily standup meetings” of a normal Scrum process. But in the Scrum
of Scrums meeting, the team members will only discuss stories or fea-
tures where there are dependencies with stories and work the other Scrum
teams are doing. Like a standup meeting, the purpose will be for each
representative to provide their update/status to the other team’s status and
progress and also review dependencies between the teams’ work.
Let’s take this concept another step further. For the parts of the proj-
ect—or subprojects or work-packages—that are being managed in a tra-
ditional waterfall way, why not allow the classic traditional PM, who is
managing these subprojects, attend the Scrum of Scrums meetings to
ensure coordination between these parts of the project and the other parts
being handled with Scrum? To make sure all this works smoothly, the tra-
ditional PM will need to understand very well how Scrum works and why
Hybrid Projects 59
Because Scrum is “lightweight,” – many people think it is inappropriate for more

complex projects.
A possible solution is to divide the project into multiple Scrum teams, and then
have representatives from each Scrum team attend “Scrum of Scrum meetings” to
coordinate the activities in the different teams. The Scrum of Scrums will work much
like the daily stand-up meetings, but perhaps not on a daily basis.
Figure 1.13 Scrum with complex projects?
parts of the project are being handled with Scrum. The Scrum Master
representatives to this Scrum of Scrums meeting will need to understand
why parts of the project are being managed in the traditional way and be
tolerant and open-minded to that approach, as well.
Now, the graphic in Figure 1.13 looks like the one in Figure 1.14.
Does this “Scrum of Scrums” approach provide a ready solution for
handling almost all large, complex projects where there are many stake-
holders and stakeholder groups? Also, could we keep expanding on this
idea, so that for even larger and more complex programs, we can go to
a “Scrum of Scrums of Scrums” concept? No, I think there are limits to
how far we should attempt to take this idea. We must still deal with the #1
Risk that we defined earlier: “Define scope so the approved requirements
are SMART, but also where boundaries and exclusions are defined, and
the stakeholders are all on the same page!” This is the hard part of project
management. In Agile, we are transferring the primary responsibility for
accomplishing this from the classic fully accountable PM to the product
owner. But doing such a transfer doesn’t readily solve the problem or sim-
plify the difficulty of accomplishing this task. In a large, complex project
or program with many stakeholder groups, we may need multiple prod-
uct owners representing key functional business areas, and these product
owners may have different needs and goals. There can be incompatibilities
We could try a hybrid approach, using the Scrum of Scrum approach, but for
some sub-projects, we might have a traditional PM, and have the traditional PM
attend the “Scrum of Scrum meetings.”
Traditional PM
as member of
the Scrum of
Scrum Meeting
Figure 1.14 Hybrid project—mix of Scrum and traditional
at this level, and even different political goals in the organization. So, this
could still be very difficult. When there are incompatibilities on the prior-
ities of features, stories, and requirements, someone is going to have to be
empowered to make the final decision. If almost all of the subprojects are
being handled with an Agile methodology, then we are delivering incre-
mental tangible value very quickly (in one- to four-week iterations), so
that will make it much easier to see the value, and therefore, the priority
of what is being created. But someone has to be either a fully account-
able PM or a fully accountable product owner and make a decision on
priorities and formally accept what is being created in the project. It’s
essential that the right product owner be chosen. You do not want to have
a situation where four or five iterations have passed and the sponsor for
the project vetoes what the product owners have approved, and we have
to go back to square one.
One danger of trying to employ a “Scrum of Scrums” concept or mul-
tiple project teams—whether the teams are using an Agile approach or a
traditional approach—is letting the number of Scrum teams or number
of subprojects get out-of-hand. On the FBI Sentinel project, Sutherland
said it was essential to reduce the number of stakeholders on the project,
and a key part of their success when they adopted a Scrum approach
was to reduce the staff from 220 to 40. Also, on the Medco project we
previously mentioned, stakeholders were deadlocked on what should be
included in the project and what the priorities of the requirements should
Hybrid Projects 61
be. When they adopted a Scrum approach for handling their “impossible
constraint,” they dramatically reduced the number of requirements and
were able to get agreement on the priorities. On a hybrid project, it’s still
going to be essential to maintain focus on the “20 percent of the require-
ments that will meet 80 percent of the need.” With multiple product
owners representing different business groups, and with potentially 10 to
20 subprojects, this is going to be more difficult to accomplish than when
we’re managing one Agile project. Nevertheless, it’s key that this be done.
• Lastly, if we use a Scrum of Scrums approach, or we have

multiple subprojects, there needs to be independence between
the subprojects and the Scrum teams. The teams need to
be as self-directing as possible. If there are many dependen-
cies between the subprojects and the subprojects are highly
“coupled,” then a predictive planning approach is going to be
needed. In the 1970s, when I started my career doing systems
design and programming, hot topics were “modular program-
ming,” “go-to-less programming,” and “top-down design.”
An excellent book on this subject is Reliable Software through
Composite Design, by Glenford Myers. A key point Myers
made was that to successfully create reliable software, the
program modules needed to be modularized in a top-down,
hierarchical way and the modules needed to be as “loosely
coupled” (or independent) as possible. This is very reminis-
cent of one of the key qualities of a well-written story—that
it be independent of other stories and features. (This is part
of the “INVEST” acronym for well-written stories. Stories
should be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable,
Small, and Testable.)
I said earlier that we must keep the parts of the project where we are
using Agile totally independent and distinct from the parts where we are
using a traditional or predictive planning approach, and I would like to
make some qualifications. Though this is generally correct, there can be
benefits in using some aspects of Agile on a traditional/predictive project,
especially using Agile communication techniques such as a burndown
chart or Kanban Board. Also, using Agile brainstorming techniques, facil-

itation techniques, and prioritization techniques can add a lot of value.
In Chapter 3, we will explore in much more detail how Agile can add
on key capabilities in processes defined in the PMBOK® Guide such as
Collect Requirements and Define Scope. However, in other key ways, we
need to emphasize and caution that it will be a serious mistake to try to
require other elements of waterfall and predictive planning while we are
doing Agile. For example, in the early planning stages for the Agile por-
tions or subprojects, it is a mistake to try to put together a very detailed
scope statement, a WBS with all deliverables decomposed down to level
4 or level 5, and a schedule with the critical path defined for the next six
months out. Doing this is 180 degrees apart from how and why we use
Agile. It would also be a mistake to have the classic fully accountable PM
run the Agile parts of the project. We need to empower the team, let them
choose what they will work on next out of the backlog, and make the
team accountable for the project.
Chapter 1: Summary and Conclusions

I started off this book saying these are very interesting and challenging
times for PMs. No pressure, but our companies are really depending
upon us to help them survive in these difficult days: Tom Friedman’s “Age
of Accelerations.”
I also said that project management is a difficult job, and I think
that’s an understatement. We never have all the resources we need or want
for our projects, enough budget, or enough time. Worse, we never have
all the power we really need to get agreement on key decisions and to
keep the project moving forward as we envisioned. We are not kings or
queens and we cannot force agreement on key decisions or legislate what
the outcome will be. This is all about “people skills,” “soft skills,” and
“herding cats.” Many of us are managing large, complex projects and we
are working with stakeholders who outrank us not only in our own orga-
nization, but also in external organizations. Nonetheless, it’s up to us to
get everybody onto the same page regarding the vision and requirements
for the project and other key constraints. If we don’t do this, the project
will surely fail, and the blame will fall on us, not on the unreasonable,
Hybrid Projects 63
irrational stakeholders with all their different needs and different wants!
If we can pull this off and manage this project to a successful conclusion,
this will be amazingly rewarding. There might be more lucrative things to
go do, but this will be very rewarding.
In today’s IT-centric world and technology-centric world, “knowledge
work projects” and software projects are the dominant type of project.
Surveys of PMs in the Washington, DC PMI® chapter—the largest chap-
ter in the world with over 11,000 members—in the past 5 to 10 years
have indicated that more than 70 percent of our PMs are managing IT
projects. And, by PMI’s own surveys, they reported that more than 90
percent of all IT projects are being managed using one of the Agile meth-
odologies. Agile is definitely critical for managing most projects today.
Nonetheless, I have argued there is definitely a time and place to
use the traditional, and even waterfall, project management approaches.
There is a lot of sound, core knowledge in the traditional approaches that
should not be neglected. We should be big enough and open-minded
enough to recognize this. There will be times when we need a fixed-price
contract with our customer where all the I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed.
In many of these situations, we will need to do predictive planning and
use a waterfall approach. However, increasingly, our projects today are
“knowledge work” projects, and we will need to discover and explore
requirements as quickly as we can with short iterations. Agile methodol-
ogies will be the best choices in these situations. Lastly, many of our proj-
ects are large enough and complex enough that parts of the project should
be handled with the waterfall approach and parts should be handled with
Agile. No one process and no one methodology fits all situations. I am
convinced that hybrid approaches will be increasingly important in the
coming years.
I hope I’ve made that case for you too or, at least, provoked some
questions and thought on this topic!
Index
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers to footnotes.
Accountablity, 82 Budget at completion (BAC), 8,
Activity on Node (AON) diagram, 45–47, 70, 72, 73
52n24 Burndown chart, 47
Actual cost (AC), 46–47 Business risks, 36–38, 78
Affinity diagrams, 98, 107, 108
“Age of Accelerations,” 17, 62, 150 Certified Associate in Project
Agile Management (CAPM®), 100
case for, 15–29 Classic S-curve chart, 46–47
contracts, 22, 65–68, 71, 134–142 Cohn, Mike, 128
cost of change, 9, 25, 26 Collect Requirements, 11, 13, 41, 62,
estimating methods, 125–128 106, 108, 118, 147, 149
with EVM, 70–73 College of Performance Management
Lean and, 30, 35, 72, 99 (See also (CPM), 22
Lean) Colocated, 3, 4, 17, 50, 51, 57, 81,
lifecycle, 17–18 84, 86–92, 94
methodologies, 46 Communications, 48–51
problem areas, 29–35 tools, 90–92
project management, 80, 81, 94 weekly, 92
risks, 35–51 Communications Management, 12,
Agile Estimating and Planning 105
(Cohn), 128 Complexity, 78–80
Agile Ethos, 31n14, 83, 87, 151 “Cone of Uncertainty,” 17, 67, 125,
Agile in name only (AINO), 53 126
Agile Manifesto, 81, 94, 94n4, 135, Configuration management, 73–78
139 Consensus, 92–93
Agile Practice Guide®, 96n2, Continuous Integration, 76, 76n2
97, 99, 111n5, 112, Cookie-cutter projects, 2, 3, 33, 55,
125, 135 57, 124
Agile Project Management with Corrective Action, 130–131n7
Scrum (Schwaber), 58 Cost estimates, 101, 122–134
Agile team charter, 83–84 Cost of change, 9, 25, 26
Agile team development, 86–88 Cost of conformance, 121
Analogous Estimating, 123 Cost of non-conformance, 121
Architectural spikes, 133 Cost of Quality (COQ), 119–121
Arnold, J. June 12, 2006. “Cisco Cost performance index (CPI), 45,
Telepresence Demo,” 90 45n21, 46, 47, 50, 72, 73
Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF), 137
BIM (Building Information Cost Plus Fee (CPF), 136
Modeling), 9 Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF), 137
Bottom-Up Estimating, 122–123 Cost Plus Incentive Fee (CPIF),
Brainstorming, 13, 62, 107, 118 137–139
158 Index
Cost Plus Percentage of Cost (CPPC), Estimate Activity Resources, 101

136, 137 Estimate at completion (EAC),
Cost-reimbursable (CR) contracts, 45–47, 72, 73
65–67, 68n1, 104, 135 Estimate Costs, 101
Cost variance (CV), 45, 73 Estimate to completion (ETC),
Covey, Stephen, 89 45–47, 72
Create WBS, 11, 41, 106, 110, 147, Extreme Programming (XP), 1,
148 24–25, 29, 33, 54, 76, 122
Critical Chain Method (CCM), 100 Extreme Project Management
Critical path method (CPM), 7 (DeCarlo), 19, 36, 80n3
Crosby, Philip, 121
Face-to-face meetings, 92
Data Definition Languages (DDLs), Feature breakdown structure (FBS),
77 111
DeCarlo, Doug, 19, 27, 36, 44, 80n3, Feedback cycles, 24–25
107, 122 Feickert, Heidi, 43
Defect Repair, 131n7 Fibonacci series, 127
Defense Acquisition University Firm fixed price (FFP) contract, 3, 10,
(DAU), 112–113 30n13, 63, 65–66, 134–136,
Define Scope, 11, 13, 41, 62, 104, 138
108, 110, 118, 147, 149 5 Waves of Trust, The (Covey), 89
Delighter/Exciter, 109 Fixed Price—Economic Price
Delphi technique, 100, 125, 127, 128 Adjustment (FP-EPA), 136
Deming, W. Edwards, 22, 122 Fixed Price Incentive Fee (FPIF)
Department of Defense (DoD), 7 contract, 136, 138, 139
Develop Charter, 149 Fixed price work-packages, 140
Development iteration, 18, 113, 126 Fleming, 8, 15, 16, 45, 70
DevOps, 28, 54 Fowler, Martin, 76–77, 76n2
DevOps Handbook, The: How to Friedman, Thomas, 5
Create World-Class Agility, Friedman, Tom, 17, 27, 62
Reliability, and Security in
Technology Organizations, 28 Gantt chart, 6, 39, 52, 52n24
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Gantt, Henry, 6
54, 55 Graduated fixed price contract,
Dissatisfier, 109 140–141
Dobson, Michael, 43 Gratitude, 83
Dot voting, 110 Guide to the Project Management
Duration estimates, 122–134 Body of Knowledge, A, 10n5,
Dynamic Systems Development 11n7, 97
Method (DSDM), 30n13, 68,
140, 142 Half-baked ideas, 36–40, 49, 58, 129
Highsmith, Jim, 53
Earned Value (EV), 7, 8, 45–47, 70, “How Do We Make Hybrid
71, 73, 110 Approaches Work?”, 29–35,
Earned Value Management (EVM), 2, 51–62
7–9, 14, 22, 45, 46, 46n22, 100-point method, 110
50, 57, 70–73, 99, 104, 132 Hybrid project management, 51–62,
Effective leaders characteristics, 115 99, 150
Index 159
IKIWISI—“I’ll know it when I see Lifecycle costing, 23, 119, 120

it!”, 30n13, 39
Impossible constraints/impossible Managers characteristics, 115
project, 35, 40–48, 58, 61, Mapping process, 112, 113, 115,
129 144–146
Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Market trust level, 89
Estimable, Small, and Testable Martin Fowler “Continuous
(INVEST), 61 Integration,” 76n2
Indifferent, 109 Medco, 19–21, 32, 44, 60
Initiation Stage, 126–127, 149 Mind-mapping, 107, 118
Innovators, The: How a Group of Minimum viable product (MVP),
Hackers, Geniuses, and 34–35
Geeks Created the Digital Modern project management, 6–14,
Revolution (Isaacson), 31n15 51
Integration management, 114–117 “Money for Nothing and Change
Integrity, 82 for Free” contract, 69–70,
Isaacson, Walter, 31n15 141–142
ISO definition, 118 Monopoly money, 110
Issue log., 133 Monte Carlo simulation, 11, 42, 50,
ITTO (inputs, tools–techniques, and 98
outputs), 96–98, 100–102 MoSCoW analysis, 109
Myers, Glenford, 61
Joint application design (JAD), 13,
107, 118 Network diagram, 39, 42, 52n24, 53
Nominal Group Technique, 107
“Kaizen,” 23, 121 “Number One Risk?”, 10–14
Kanban, 22, 39, 50, 54, 62, 84, 86
Kano analysis, 109 Occam’s Razor, 3
Kapur, Gopal, 38, 49 Organizational risks, 37–38, 78
Keep It Simple Stupid! (KISS) Organization trust level, 89
principle, 3
Kerzner, Harold, 6, 7, 112 Parametric Estimating, 124
Kill points, 36–40, 45, 69, 106, 129, Parente, Susan, 51, 80–83
141 Pareto’s law, 19
Knowledge Areas (KAs), 104, 105, Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis,
114, 115, 119, 122, 131, 142, 131
144–149, 147n9 Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis,
Knowledge work project, 9, 17, 22, 42
26, 63, 125, 150 Plan-do-check-act (PDCA) loop,
Koppelman, 8, 15, 16, 45, 70 22–24, 26, 27, 35, 45, 50,
121, 122, 131, 148
Lean, 18, 19, 21–23, 27, 28, 30, Planned value (PV), 46–47
30n13, 35, 44, 54, 56, 67, Planning Poker, 127, 128
70–72, 99, 106, 108, 119, PMBOK® Guide—Analogous
148 Estimating, Bottom-Up
Lean Software Development, 23 Estimating, Parametric
Lean Software Development (Mary Estimating, and Three-Point
and Poppendieck), 119 Estimating, 42, 122. See also
160 Index
Project Management Body of duration and cost estimates,

Knowledge (PMBOK®) Guide 122–128
PMI-ACP® (PMI Agile Certified exposure draft, 142–149
Professional) certification, 70, history, 97
134 integration management, 114–117
PMI-RMP® (“PMI Risk Management quality management, 117–122
Professional”) certification, risk management, 128–134
134 Project Management Plan, 102
PMIWDC (Washington, DC PMI Project Management Professional
Chapter), 14, 74, 95, 104, (PMP®), 7, 13, 19, 25, 34,
129 38, 65, 66, 74, 77, 80, 95,
Point of Total Assumption (PTA), 138 96, 96n2, 97, 98, 100–103,
Post-it notes/sticky notes, 127 103n4, 104, 114, 116, 122,
Predictive planning, 2–4, 7, 9, 15, 22, 129, 130, 134, 135, 138, 139
35, 61–63, 73, 74, 78–80, 97, Project managers (PMs), 1–4, 2n2,
99, 103, 113, 118, 132 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 29,
Preventive Action, 131n7 33, 34, 36, 37, 40, 48, 49,
Preventive Change Requests (PMI®), 53, 57–60, 62, 63, 66, 74,
12, 14, 29, 36, 41, 44n20, 63, 80, 98–101, 104, 105, 112,
67, 70, 72, 96, 96n2, 97–99, 114–117, 125, 130, 131n7,
101, 103n4, 106, 114, 115, 134, 146–151
117–119, 123, 124n6, 125, Project planning, 88–89
128, 130–131n7, 134–136, Project risks, 37, 40
138, 142, 144, 147, 149 Projects types, 4–6
Prioritization techniques, 62, 99, Prototyping, 107
108–110, 131, 149
Procurement management, 134–142 QFD (quality function deployment),
Product risks/technical risks, 37 13, 107, 118
Professional tools, 92 Quality Is Free (Crosby), 121
Program Evaluation and Review Quality management, 19, 23, 104,
Technique (PERT), 7, 100, 117–122
124–125, 124n6 Quiet writing, 108
Program management office (PMO), Quijano, Jorge, 74–75
1, 2, 53, 57
Project Delivery Principles, 142, 143, Relationship trust level, 89
146, 147 Release planning, 18, 68, 126, 127,
Project lifecycle, 23, 28, 39–41, 45, 149
46, 70, 119, 133 Reliable Software through Composite
Project Management—A Systems Design (Myers), 61
Approach to Planning, Remember the future, 108
Scheduling, and Controlling Requests for proposals (RFPs), 18
(Kerzner), 112 Responsibility Assignment Matrix
Project Management Body of (RAM), 88
Knowledge (PMBOK®) Risk breakdown structure (RBS), 36,
Guide, 10–14, 11n7, 23, 29, 37, 40, 78, 132
38, 41, 42, 50, 53, 62, 65, 75, Risk management, 36, 102, 104,
77, 95–113, 150–151 128–134
contract types, 134–142 Risk Register, 132–133
Index 161
Risk spikes, 79, 133 Stakeholder Management, 12, 14,

Rita Mulcahy’s PMP Exam Prep 38, 105
(Mulcahy), 129 Standard for Project Management,
Rough order of magnitude (ROM), The—Seventh Edition,
72, 123 143–145
Round robin, 108 “Standards Plus Digital Content
Platform, The,” 144–149
Satisfier, 109 Start with Why (Sinek), 116
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), 54, Statement of Work (SOW), 3, 32, 33,
55 65, 66, 105, 115, 136, 140
Schedule performance index (SPI), Sutherland, Jeff, 5, 19, 27, 32, 42, 60,
45, 72, 73 69, 72, 101, 141
Schedule variance (SV), 45, 73 SWOT (strengths, weaknesses,
Schwaber, Ken, 19n8, 58, 71, 101 opportunities, threats), 91–92
Scope Creep, 11, 11n6, 47, 66
Scope Management, 11, 12, 14, 106, Team building, 83, 89–90, 93
110, 114, 118 Team charter, 83–84, 86, 88, 94
Scrum, 1, 21, 27, 32, 33, 42, 44, Team consensus, 92–93
52–54, 57–61, 71, 94, 101, Team meetings, 92
116, 150 Ten Dumb Mistakes That Project
Scrum Master, 29, 59, 116, 117, 127, Managers Make (Kapur), 38,
151 49
Scrum of Scrums meetings, 58–61, Thank You for Being Late
150 (Friedman), 5
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice That is to be determined (TBD), 68
the Work in Half the Time That Used to Be Us: How
(Sutherland), 5, 19, 72 America Fell Behind in
S-curve chart, 46–47 the World It Invented
Self trust level, 89 (Friedman), 5
Senior management, 11, 32, 35, 37, Theory X management, 31
39, 40, 44, 48–51, 56, 57, 68, Theory Y management, 31, 87
69, 135, 141 Three-Point Estimating, 124–125
Shewhart, Walter, 22, 122 Time & Materials (T&M) contracts,
Simple Earned Value on All Projects 65, 67–69, 71, 72, 105, 135,
(Simplified Translations of the 138–142
27 EVM Criteria), 8–9, 45, To-complete performance index
70–71 (TCPI), 45
Sinek, Simon, 116 Total Quality Management (TQM)
Six Dimensions of Project methodology, 104
Management, The: Turning Toyota Production System, 23, 28,
Constraints into Resources 119
(Dobson and Feickert), 43 Traditional project management, 6–14,
Societal trust level, 89 23, 45, 57, 70, 90, 132, 151
Spaghetti code, 80 Triple constraints, 37, 43, 146
Specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, Trust, 30, 30n13, 31, 31n14, 56,
and timebound (SMART), 81–83, 85, 87–90, 112, 115,
11, 14, 105 135, 139, 150, 151
Stakeholder influence, 25 Trust Quotient, 82
162 Index
Unit Price contracts, 138 Virtual project team management,

User acceptance testing (UAT), 16, 90–93
24, 26 Virtual standup meetings, 87
Virtual team performance, 93
Validate Scope, 10, 119
Value Delivery System, 143, 148 Washington, DC PMI Chapter
Video conferencing, 81, 85, 87 (PMIWDC), 14, 74, 95, 104,
Virtual Agile project, 51, 80–83, 129
85–94 Waterfall approach, 1–3, 6–8, 10, 15,
Virtual Agile teams, 80–83, 85–87, 41, 45, 46n22, 51, 52, 55–58,
93, 94 62, 63, 70, 71, 73, 74, 79, 97,
best practices for, 92 99, 103, 123, 126, 150, 151
management, 90–92 What Is Hybrid Agile, 52n23
project planning, 88–89 Work breakdown structure (WBS),
Virtual agile tools, 84–86, 90 2, 7, 8, 62, 110, 111, 111n5,
Virtual communication, 86, 90–92 112–114, 123
Virtual environment, 86, 87, 94 World Is Flat, The (Friedman), 5

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Hybrid Project Management

Hybrid Project Management

Mark Tolbert and Susan Parente

Copyright © Business Expert Press, LLC, 2020.

Cover image licensed by Ingram Image, StockPhotoSecrets.com

Cover and interior design by Exeter Premedia Services Private Ltd.,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

First published in 2020 by

ISBN-13: 978-1-95253-834-6 (paperback)

Business Expert Press Portfolio and Project Management Collection

Collection ISSN: 2156-8189 (print)

First edition: 2020

Printed in the United States of America.

We live in a very interesting time. Compared to just a couple of decades

Agile methodology is superior in all situations (Susan has coined the

Key risks we will explore are:

1. Poor Scope definition – (the #1 risk on projects)! This usually stems

Other topics that will be explored are:

• How to implement a hybrid approach that employs both

Intended Audience and Benefits – All project managers, program man-

Mark Tolbert, PMP, PMI-ACP

July 23, 2020

Chapter 1 Hybrid Projects: The Need to Be Open to Different

Building Team Trust����������������������������������������������������������������89

For Further Reading – References used for this Book������������������������������153

Hybrid Projects: The Need

must be a written, formally approved project management plan with a

The Landscape for Projects Today

• “Make dust or eat dust!”

We are dealing with a much tougher competitive landscape today—we

The Roots of Modern Project Management and the

with the advent of Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT),

• Performing exhaustive, detailed planning for all phases of the

• Measuring performance during the project using EVM.

If you’re building a new bridge or building, you probably want to

• This is perhaps the most important requirement for imple-

it: Earned Value Measurement cannot take place without

Why is it so crucial in construction and engineering to first obtain the full

Risk #1: The Number One Risk on Projects!

There are several other reasons the traditional “waterfall” methodology

Project Management Institute, A Guide to the Project Management Body of

Knowledge, Sixth Edition, Project Management Institute, Inc., 2017.

the scope statement are poorly written—not “SMART”—specific, mea-

emotional intelligence. What is the key part of emotional intelligence or

Requirements: Charter ->

Figure 1.1 Foundational KAs (processes)

1. As we said, our principal risk involves doing Scope Management well

• Don’t misunderstand the complexity of the requirements:

exam—we will never have enough power to legislate what will be in

The Case for Agile

Figure 1.2 Traditional project lifecycle structure

requirements documentation (the functional specification). We obtained

Iterations in a Software/Knowledge Work Project

Figure 1.3 The “Cone of Uncertainty”

work best. In our world today—Tom Friedman’s “Age of Accelerations”—

“Initiation” Release Planning Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3

Figure 1.4 Agile lifecycle

• At the time, Medco was a Fortune 100 Firm: world’s largest

• There were reams of paper outlining requirements, compli-

• Partially done work

Chapter 1 Hybrid Projects: The Need to Be Open to Different

Building Team Trust��89

For Further Reading – References used for this Book��153