Amid swirling rumors that Mark Twain was gravely ill, a journalist wrote to inquire about his health. The ever-witty Twain responded, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Numerous articles, videos, and blog posts have declared, “Agile is dead!” Agile is not dead; it is evolving.
Earned Work Management is a lightweight, approach-agnostic project performance measurement system that supports Waterfall, Scrum, and Kanban. This allows organizations employing different project approaches to measure project portfolio performance consistently.
Meteorologists are better at predicting the weather than project managers are at delivering projects. About a third of projects are delivered on time, on budget, and with the desired scope. By contrast, a seven-day forecast is accurate about
Project managers ascend the career ladder based on accumulated experience-derived wisdom and managing progressively larger and more complicated efforts. A typical trajectory involves moving from managing projects to programs, portfolios, and project management organizations. Success at one level is not a guarantee of success at the next. It is the classic case of “what got you here will not get you there.”
Stakeholder alignment—or lack thereof—can be the difference between project success and failure. In today’s dynamic business environment, projects face multiple stakeholders and constituencies. Often, these groups have competing or divergent interests.
Hybrid projects are not constrained by a single methodology or well-defined framework. By definition, they are a melding melding of practices. A huge responsibility accompanies this unbounded freedom of choice. Project managers must clearly describe how the project will be executed to be successful.
A project manager’s first major decision is selecting the approach and lifecycle. Historically, this was a non-issue. The default option was preordained based on the project type, organizational preferences, and inertia.
Construction and engineering projects were always predictive. For software projects, organizational factors outside the project manager’s control often drove the predictive versus agile decision. Ad hoc and homegrown project approaches skipped standard practices and lacked repeatability or consistency.
I authored my first project management article 10 years ago. A mentor recommended I start writing to launch my transition from managing project organizations to teaching. Writing those early articles was challenging. Reducing complex ideas into writing is a skill requiring practice and discipline.
Hybrid project management just had its breakout moment!
The Project Management Institute’s Pulse of the Profession® 2024 reported that hybrid (32%) is now the second most commonly used approach. Predictive (44%) still holds a commanding lead. And, agile (26%) use fell by 2 percentage points.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Projects can generate a lot of data. Large, mature organizations generally have the tools to capture, store, and analyze this information effectively. However, small and less mature organizations and those leading non-traditional efforts often lack the tools, practices, and experience.