Agile Projects are Really Hybrid Scrum/Waterfall

Agile is hugely popular. Most of us think of the old traditional waterfall method for projects to be as outdated as CD-ROM drives. Today, we're all delivering product iteratively with scrums and weekly sprints.

Hold on partner.

Have you all really switched to pure agile using scrum methods and kicked the waterfall bucket? I say probably not... and that's not a bad thing.

Unless your firm is a SaaS software vendor delivering continuously without end, then like the rest of us your projects have start and end dates along with fixed budgets. This article speaks to those types of projects.

The Agile Waterfall Blueberry Crumb Pie

The pie's top crumb layer — project inception and planning [Waterfall]

When we start up a project or discuss the viability of a project, we go through some sort of planning or inception phase. This is not where we would define requirements, but where we identify the purpose, business value, strategic alignment, and business success factors. The requirements could be defined up front if they are already very well known with near zero risk of change. However, that's only a small percent of most projects. Most projects need ingredients and recipes where there's a level of risk with change.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of business projected value
• 1/2 cup of goal and objectives
• 2 tablespoons of all purpose corporate strategy
• 1 stick of unsalted budget scope
• 1/2 teaspoon of technology approach
• 3/4 cup of customer and team collaboration and change aptitude

Feel free to fuss with the type of ingredients and their amounts. If we have any experience with similar projects in the past, we will most likely have a solid recipe on what to do with these ingredients. This would be our framework, blueprint, methodology, or best practice process. Assuming we do have this experience, we're in waterfall mode. If not, and we're not sure what we're doing, then jump straight into an iterative scrum mode to figure it out along the way. Assuming this is not our first project of this sort, then we can prepare the this pie's top crust in advance.

The pie's filling — design, development, testing, and deployment [Agile/Scrum]

The project is in full gear and our team has a scrum product manager with experience on driving sprints. Here we are driving initial requirements, prioritizing, getting feedback, and time-boxing what we agree to develop the upcoming week.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of raw requirements with more to come later
• 3 tablespoons of refined requirements shaved for this week
• 5 sticks of sweetened team members ready to collaborate
• 1 cup of technology
• 1 can of DevOps architecture for weekly releases to production
• 3/4 cup of customer and team collaboration and change aptitude

Again, let's not be too picky with the ingredients, which we can change for each project depending on appetites and allergies. The recipe is repetitive and we'll only make small batches each week. Think of small meals or tapas. The idea is not to fill up our stomach that can make us ill if we got it wrong, but just enough for tasting that provides feedback and asking for more.

This middle filling can look messy, but if done right with a good scrum recipe, then it will bake in smoothly each week.

The key differentiator here is continuous deployment at the end of each sprint. Some production deliverables may take more than one sprint to make a consumable meal for the dining room, so no worries to hold that dish until it has enough of the right ingredients and slow-cook simmering.

The pie's bottom crust — close phase [Waterfall]

As the number of iterations and deployments fill up everyone's appetite and the dining out budget is maxed out for the season, we need to bring the project to a closure. This could include the following ingredients:

• 2 cups of lessons learned from encountered issues and risks
• 1 full bag of ideas to improve future projects
• 3 tablespoons of customer value conclusions
• 1/2 cup of closure agreements
• 3/4 cup of customer and team collaboration and change aptitude

Yes, we're back in the waterfall mode since we know in advance on how to close down projects. We have done this many times in the past and have a good framework of steps we need to get done.

It's all Hybrid

The model above is pretty simplistic. In reality, your mix of waterfall and agile could be a triple decker or more as you may mix them throughout the engagement as needed. My point is although the development team may feel their project is pure agile and your project manager may see it as waterfall, the overall project from start to finish is really a hybrid of agile and waterfall.

A good friend of mine likes to call this “Wagile”. Hmm...

What about project tools. We find that the planning and closing of the project is done with tools like MS Project while the middle scrum part is done with tools like JIRA or Trello. What about a tool that allows both waterfall and agile on the same project? This would mean a tool for hybrid agile/waterfall projects and with full transparency and more cross team collaboration.

This article was written based on the original Pie blog called "Agile Projects are Really Waterfall with Agile." On a related note, also check out the follow-up blog called "Hybrid Agile Manifesto and Spider Man".