By Valeria Albuquerque, Scrum Master at BairesDev.
The year 2022 is gone, and with it, a year that brought the world constant learning, unlearning, and relearning things out of necessity rather than choice, especially due to consequences stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is now 2024, and changes will keep happening at a rate never seen before in all sectors. We know the digital world is evolving in a disruptive way, and the areas of development and project management need to keep track of all these updates and start considering their relevance and functions with a strategic and creative digital mindset. We need to understand and anticipate the end users’ needs and desires, as well as apply new digital solutions to project management.
Our CEO, Nacho de Marco, stated in the article Which Industries Are Primed for Digital Disruption? that “The world is far from being entirely digital. Today, there are several industries that are ready for digital disruption.” With this in mind, developers are incentivized to face new challenges and raise the bar for the services and solutions they provide in the digital world and their projects. High-performing organizations have ripe digital transformation strategies and continuously reskill and upskill their workforce.
This year, project management methodologies are expected to acquire a disruptive angle. For the IT community, their projects will likely continue to evolve from a very traditional Waterfall way to a more Agile way and become even more hybrid-modeled. The market has to keep up with the speed at which the world consumes information, and it is evident that changes are emerging and becoming widespread.
Hybrid approaches to project management arise and start to shine. The numbers are changing gradually. According to a recent report on global trends in project management, just 26% of respondents said their companies have an established project methodology (Agile or Waterfall), and 39% said their organizations use a combination of Agile and Waterfall. It is interesting to note that 18% said they apply more than one approach within a project, and 17% said they have no established methodology.
The term “hybrid” refers to the combination of Agile and Waterfall. As the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains, hybrid means “having or produced by a combination of two or more distinct elements.”
Why hybrid? For starters, let’s take a look at the benefits of blended project management. It allows us to get the best of both worlds and enables project managers to leverage their different approaches’ strengths while understanding weaknesses or potential pitfalls. This year’s promised project management software approach is expected to include considerable gains in improving product delivery. It will determine how companies and organizations will perform in a competitive landscape and answer questions like “How will projects involve business strategy implementation?” or “How will projects be able to fulfill requirements, meet deadlines, manage teams and be flexible with the new ways of working?”
Through hybrid project management, we can combine traditional and agile approaches. In multi-project environments, Scrum Masters use various strategies to tackle complex problems. Implementing hybrid models synchronizes all communications, projects, people, and tasks in one place while aligning with business goals.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) describes organizations as “gymnastic enterprises: they focus on outcomes rather than process, with a clear sense of how to balance structure and governance with the need to flex and pivot on demand. … They empower their people to make change happen.”
A New Paradigm?
In 2022, digitalization projects implied rethinking the way to automate workflows, insights, and analytics and consuming and integrating new technology. In 2024, technological innovation will accentuate project management trends even more.
There will be many advanced project management solutions. These solutions will be game-changing in planning, executing, and controlling projects through an emphasis on AI automation and implementation, and will have a role in the project management world using Agile adaptable methodologies with a lean mindset that brings analytic gain to achieve transparency and productivity.
AI-based automation provides more accurate decisions for more successful projects. It allows teams to identify essential factors to correct the planning stage and reduce unnecessary costs and risks.
Agile was a groundbreaking solution when it started (in the early 2000s), and it was combined with different approaches to understand how technology and organizations would absorb it and react to it. Agile has contributed immense value to management processes, generating advancements in planning and executing IT-related projects.
We are changing from traditional juxtaposition management of processes in other paradigmatic ways. The “either-or” mindset (Waterfall versus Agile) needed to change into a more hybrid one.
And how does it impact our company perspective? To begin with, the delivery team projects we are now handling have a great potential of being hybrid and not only Agile. Even though we are working theoretically in an Agile environment, our processes at BairesDev suggest using both structures. It has helped our organization achieve goals and optimize the profitability of new projects.
By combining these structures, metrics, and mindset, we can provide and recommend to our clients best practices for not only governance but also software development life cycle (SDLC) processes. Therefore, our projects can deliver value and govern IT-related business with high quality.
Hybrid project management is increasing. This approach refers to how teams are and will use Agile methodologies and Waterfall (the detailed traditional methodology). The goal here is to introduce skills to help the team operate at a higher level of the technical base and simultaneously be aware of the detailed life cycle of the project, i.e., being able to modify and plan when needed.
There is a growing need for the approach to be more flexible, and project plans must allow the Project Manager to lead unconventionally and understand many elements of diverse methodologies that can capture the team’s needs and perceive time frames, environment, and end goals.
Another significant change to expect is a stakeholder-centered design in projects, which includes an increasing focus on transparency and building products that consider the human perspective. According to Dave Thomsen, VP of Wanderful Media, “Pixel-perfect mockups and Dribble-friendly UI elements are just one component of a well-designed product.” It is more about “Design Thinking” – a repeatable, human-centered method for creative problem-solving and innovation.
Our high-performance management success is based on transformational flows that provide continuous improvement through the entire life cycle of the program while keeping a disciplined approach to planning and organizing, as well as actively motivating and controlling resources to achieve specific client goals and meet specific client success criteria.
Applying different project management typologies (predictive and adaptive) may seem a little bizarre in the beginning, but whoever has been involved in one of our delivery projects knows that the challenge is big, especially when you work with a client that believes they work with Agile methodologies. It’s often simply not the case. We then need to implement the processes, milestones, due dates, and high-level estimations in an Agile environment and still meet our internal requirements, but we have to build the structure from scratch.
Each sprint is a new source of information, and the projects would therefore have to be adaptive due to our time-to-market projections. Scopes may change and, at the same time, have to be respected, deadlines need to be revised and negotiated, and clients need to be satisfied. And how do we manage all that? The secret here is high-performing, high-technical-level teams, hard work, and creativity.
It is fair to conclude that although our company faces many different challenges, we are successfully proposing new solutions to our clients and using our expertise on how to adapt and iterate our process with assertiveness when and where it is due. We aim to be the best in the market. The challenge is real, and so far, we have won this battle with excellency. New methodologies will come, and I believe in BairesDev and its unique style of innovation. It is, and will always be, ready to face the future and the changes that are so important to help us raise the bar and set new industry standards.
