Hybrid project management: a tailored approach

Enterprises face significant barriers while trying to adopt a fully agile approach. It is demonstrated that an incremental approach is highly appreciated compared to a traditional one especially in the IT sector, but internal and external factors force companies to slow down this transition. This master thesis aims to explore the impact of a tailored hybrid project management approach on a small-sized IT consulting company in order to overcome common drawbacks of adopting a waterfall or purely agile approach, with a particular focus on the monitoring phase by building an ad-hoc project monitoring dashboard. To understand the benefits of such custom approach, the company’s project managers have been interviewed to assess an as-is analysis of the internal project management process, in which it resulted that there was a lack of standardization and each project manager adopted its personal approach. A pilot project has been used to set up a standard and customized hybrid project management approach. A general planning phase has been performed upfront to determine a budget and an estimation of the effort, while a detailed planning has been done with an agile tool at the conclusion of each deliverable, considered as an incremental product delivered to the client. Each deliverable has been divided in sprints to be delivered inside the company to evaluate the project performance, which have been assessed through a monitoring dashboard that displayed information about the overall project performance and resources. The results showed a wide appreciation by the interviewed project managers and suggests that in some settings tailored hybrid approaches can be likely more successful compared to the standard agile and waterfall ones. Further steps of study will be the exploration of this approach on a portfolio and programme level.