Working in hybrid projects

[Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION_]

We enjoy working agile in our projects. Nevertheless, we repeatedly face the challenge that we can only work on part of the project in an agile way.

The start and end of the project are handled predictive. This means that we take a hybrid approach to almost every project, which does not make it any easier to show on the boards.

How do you work with hybrid projects? How do you manage working in sprints combined to working in a waterfall model?

[Tal Rosenberegr]

Hi Carsten,

How are you?

There is no straight forward answer.

We have vast experience with such cases and we are doing consulting to our clients.

Tal@circlez.ai
+972549338666

[Staffan Redelius]

Hi @Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION_ 

Scrum is designed to work in timeboxed sprints. As you mention this does not work well with hybrid/waterfall.

Here some suggestions.

• Skip using timeboxed sprints and use Kanban instead. In that way you don't need to match activites within a timeboxed frame and instead focus on flow.
• If you still want or need to work in sprints, do the preparations in the backlog and only handle the deliveries in the sprints. 

A project is per definition a temporary organization and Agile frameworks predicts a fixed team. But you can pick the best from both worlds. It will not be textbook Agile or waterfall but if it works I don't see any problems.

If you wan't to discuss this further don't hesitate to reach out here on the forum or to me directly, I have worked in similar projects for many years.

Best regards,
/Staffan

[Daryl Marsh]

We have all of our IT Teams setup with their own Jira projects and then we have Strategic/EPMO type projects. We have also edited the default issuetype hierarchy to Initiative, Epic, Feature, Story/Task. When a Project Manager needs an IT Team to do work they create an Epic on the EPMO project for that work. The IT Team then creates a Feature to deliver that work and links the Feature to the Epic with the parent field. Using Plans, we can see all work being done.

We found this beneficial because the IT Teams are working in their own backlog and are allowed to work how they work. The separation allows the business teams on the EPMO project to work more waterfall.

Hope this helps.