How to blend Agile and Classic management methods within a single Portfolio

Some authors predict that?hybrid?organizations will soon dominate the business landscape. The term?hybrid?in this specific context indicates a setup in which agile and classic teams coexist in a single organization. Project Management Institute states openly that?hybrid?is the next step for organizations to be taken once they implement the principles of agile. We also keep hearing from BigPicture users:?let us mix agile and classic methodologies. In this article we’ll touch on the software aspect: (1) how to make a mix of PM methodologies a reality within an organization; (2)?how to allow for a collection of management tools, rather than a single one;?(3) how to keep the middle- to upper-level reporting consistent in a multi-tool environment.

Surprising studies

According to?Gartner, even in the software industry, a mere 46% of organizations use agile for?most or all?of their application development. A further 41% claim to be using agile for?less than half?of their application development. Interestingly, among those researched by Gartner, it was business managers who adopted agile more often than software developers: 63% of the surveyed software companies use or plan to use agile on the business side, while 53% for the actual software development.

For those who swing between agile and hybrid approaches,?PMI‘s Pulse of the Profession?, page 11, is a must. Not only did the researchers find that 44% of ‘Champions’ used predictive (classic) approaches, 30% – agile, and 23% – hybrid, but they actually positioned the last one as the next step in the project management “timeline”, directly after agile. In an effort to forecast?the future of agile transformation the researchers brilliantly asked ‘How has your organization’s agility changed over the last five years?’ 19% of respondents said that the agility has become much greater, 52% – slightly greater, 20% – no change, 6% – the agility has become slightly less present, 3% – much less.

KPMG?took yet another approach to determine where the agile transformation is heading and how it is progressing. The respondents had been asked about ‘Current position vs. expectation in 3 years’ in terms of the level of an organization at which the agile transformation is and will be happening. ‘Agile at Enterprise’ recorded the largest increase (10% today, 32% in three years), followed by ‘Agile at Selected Functions’ (14% today, 23% in three years), ‘Agile at Scale’ (8%, 15%), ‘Agile at core of IT’ (18%, 21%), ‘Agile pilots’ (38%, 5%), and ‘Not using Agile’ (12%, 4%).3

While Gartner focuses on the software industry, KPMG’s report is slightly biased towards IT (44% of the respondents). PMI, in turn, explores a broad spectrum of industries – from IT to construction, government, healthcare, or automotive.

Why do enterprises go agile?

It all boils down to keeping up with the pace of technological change dictated by startups or even big tech companies, such as Google or Amazon.?PMI names ‘Ability Is Agility’?a top tenet of leading-edge organizations.4?HBR’s authors rightly ask:?What if a company could achieve positive returns with 50% more of its new-product introductions? What if marketing programs could generate 40% more customer inquiries? What if human resources could recruit 60% more of its highest-priority targets? What if twice as many workers were emotionally engaged in their jobs? Agile has brought these levels of improvement to IT. The opportunity in other parts of the company is substantial.

Despite all the benefits that agility brings, some organizations still choose not to go agile. Regulated industries, safety-critical products, such as automobile or aircraft development are one example. The US Department of Defense Software Systems openly requires the waterfall/predictive approach from their suppliers. Other examples are businesses dependent on subcontractors, organizations whose teams are dispersed around the world, the meat and potato type of businesses whose products call for little to none innovation, or those who tried to be agile but it just didn’t work. Healthcare, banks, insurance companies, the construction industry – their core operations don’t quite match agile (innovating in these industries is quite another story, though). Agile is suitable where?problems are complex and solutions are unknown, such as product development functions, marketing projects, strategic-planning activities, supply-chain challenges, and resource allocation decisions. Agile tends not to be appropriate in?routine?operations such as plant maintenance, purchasing, sales calls, or accounting.

Entirely agile or, perhaps,?hybrid?

Agile transformation is a long and complex process. It cannot be done overnight. Consequently, initiatives conducted in diverse methodologies often coexist. Moreover, TQ, or technology quotient organizations,?as PMI calls leading companies, are much more likely to use a?mix?of agile and classic (hybrid) project management (60%) than the TQ laggards (29%).6?And for those who are?entirely?agile?PMI further claims: (…) there is little research on how to manage a set of agile projects at the project portfolio level. What limited research that does exist often assumes that portfolio-level agility can be achieved by simply scaling project level agile approaches such as Scrum.7

We think that an ‘umbrella’ software tool might be the right answer for modern hybrid and agile portfolios.

What tool for managing the portfolios in the 2020s?

What does the umbrella-type software, such as BigPicture, bring to the table? Sure, it has all the standard project management tools, such as the Gantt charts, roadmaps, resources, and risk matrices. But it can also communicate with third-party task managers so that the umbrella can take over what other tools are not that good at. Now, why is such a super-tool relevant to hybrid portfolios?

We identified five disparities that make hybrid portfolios problematic in practice:

1. predictive planning vs. iterative planning
2. precise timeline vs. draft roadmap
3. individuals vs. teams assigned
4. man-days vs. story points
5. many tools coexisting within an organization

Let’s take a closer look at why portfolio managers are struggling with each of those.

Timeline planning vs. iterative planning

While the classic, predictive PM methodologies use the timeline, hours, and deadlines, the agile teams think in terms of timeboxes and story points. Consequently, each of the two worlds resorts to its own planning tools, be it a physical board or a software solution. In such a multi-tool environment questions arise at the top management level – how are decision-makers going to track the progress of a hybrid portfolio, with many sources of truth? And as per the KPMG research cited above, it’s the?senior level?management?who’s about to experience the agile transformation to the greatest extent in the following years.

Precise timeline vs. draft roadmap

The timeline-based classic project managers schedule with 1-day precision. Agile teams, on the other hand, use less strict, iterative roadmaps which are more forgiving if a team cannot or does not want to complete any chunk of work during a 2-week iteration. Now, which of the tools promotes completing any given task as planned, whatever the cost? On the other hand, which of the two tools stimulates the creativity of a team better?

Individuals vs. teams assigned

With predictive PM methodologies, it’s an individual who is accountable for getting a task to an end. Quite differently in the agile environments – here, teams are assigned to the chunks of work. Believe it or not, but teams are way more difficult to map into a computer program than individuals, and a multitude of implementations may exist. Therefore, potential conflicts have to be resolved by an umbrella piece of software at the portfolio level.

Man-days vs. story points

Classic project management makes use of the hours and man-days, while agile teams are encouraged to use less intuitive?story points. There is no universal converter between days and story points, as the “value” of a story point is team-specific. Again, an umbrella software solution can unify the theoretically incompatible units.

Many tools existing within an organization

Nobody is omnipotent, and portfolio managers are no exception to that rule. Imagine three project management tools existing in a company, and a portfolio manager who was given access to each of those tools. A pretty steep learning curve, isn’t it? Vastness of time needed to assemble data into the consistent portfolio-level reports, every week, right? How about the umbrella software solution that is capable of producing a portfolio-level progress report in seconds?

All five challenges can be met with BigPicture 8.

Start with accurate portfolio mapping

It can be a challenge to map both predictive and agile planning in a single software package. While departments and teams that use waterfall methodologies usually compose their projects of stages, the agile teams use sprints in Scrum or ARTs/PIs/iterations in SAFe.?The table below describes how organizations cope with the featured challenges in traditional ways as opposed to how this can be done with BigPicture.

Visit our blog to discover more on how BigPicture facilitates managing hybrid portfolios.

Conclusions

What agile companies practiced during 2000-2020 might no longer be relevant during the ‘Agile at enterprise’ period of 2020-30. One trend is companies are becoming hybrid – since agile is not the ultimate answer for routine operations, and research shows that classic projects and agile programs will have to get along in many portfolios. Another trend is allowing for not one, but a collection of project management applications within an organization, so that teams remain engaged and motivated. Umbrella portfolio management software, such as BigPicture, is a viable answer to the challenges of the 2020s