Waterfall & Agile Integration. Part 1: Hybrid projects in Enterprise portfolio

Some time ago I analysed the structure of the portfolio I worked on ($1.3B / 380 projects) and found out that we had:

· 41% of Waterfall projects;
· 33% of Agile projects;
· 26% of Hybrid projects;
· 3% Not real projects (PMOs, Contingency, etc)

The issue was that we had only 2 delivery frameworks: Waterfall and Agile. Wherefrom does the high number of Hybrid projects come from then?

I found out that the “Hybrid” type was added to address the legacy issue when programs were setup as projects and these programs had Agile and Waterfall projects. However, there were only a few of those cases!

Further discovery has revealed that the majority of Hybrid projects was actually Waterfall projects, which used Scrum techniques: Daily Standups, Kanban Wall and Backlog.

All of them had approved business cases with commitments to deliver agreed outputs by agreed dates and budgets.

The issue was that PMs believed that to be “Hybrid” allowed them not to follow the Waterfall framework (process and deliverables). Later on, I’ve discovered that the majority of these projects were over budget and had major delays.

Have you ever come across these issues in your portfolios?