Vijayakrishna R N epub Hybrid Agile Project Management: Hybrid Model combining Scrum, Kanban and some Waterfall techniques to drive Innovation and Operational Excellence

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years!Agile methodology greatly helps companies to build products in iterations, get timely feedback, achieve speed to market, capture market share early, fail fast, adapt to changes quickly and more efficiently as they grow and aim to succeed.There are various types of agile methodologies in practice – Scrum, Kanban, FDD, and others.The Scrum is one of the most popular agile methodology in use by companies. While Scrum can be successfully implemented to execute the project, Scrum’s implementations can also cause several problems in a complex product type of application where simply executing each sprint as per strict agile Scrum doctrine is not practical. Some of these problems are – compromised architecture, challenges in handling dependencies, demotivated employees due to routine and time pressures, lack of creativity and innovation culture, difficulty closing the story within the sprint, too much tactical product vision instead of strategic, development environment that’s like stress chamber etc.,In author’s experience considerable amount of success can be achieved by taking Scrum as base process and then blending some Kanban and Waterfall methodologies resulting in Hybrid Agile project management process.The primary goal of this book is to outline this Hybrid Agile process for such product development projects where while pure agile concepts like Scrum time-boxing is used, some non-agile concepts are also used to overcome the drawbacks of pure agile implementations. Hybrid Agile is not a defined framework like Scrum or Kanban. The specification for Hybrid Agile given in this book is author’s definition and implementation of same by using maximum Scrum and customizing and optimizing with some Kanban, Waterfall etc.