Hybrid methodology and subjective agile performance in a company

The following section discusses the amalgamation between traditional methods like PMBOK, waterfall and the modern agile method. It also debates a case study with an introduction of a subjective agile strategy on top of an already existing Waterfall operated software and hardware team in the company. The effects of these traditional and hybrid methodology on the team performance are also discussed.

Subjective Agile

The fundamentals of the singular and standardized Agile and its different methodologies were discussed in the previous section. This section will delve into a subjective agile based on and molded according to the workings of a hardware team in the company. The basics of the Agile project management were followed to the word and merged into a preexisting Waterfall oriented software team. However, the main purpose of project management at the Graphics Hardware team was to minimize the time spent in meetings and to maximize efficiency. The standard Agile model did not fit well with the requirements of the company. The changes we introduced proved to be important in increasing the efficiency of the team and finally helped us in meeting the deadlines effectively.

The team-lead and development manager is appointed as the Product Owner (PO) for the team. He/she would have the knowledge of the internal cogs of the team. He should know about the resource bandwidth available for each sprint. He should be the one to decide the priority for all the tasks assigned. Any conflicts of priority within the team should be immediately reported to the project manager.

The scrum master was a technically sound engineer picked from a parallel team having limited knowledge about the inner workings of the team. The reason for this was that he/she should be unbiased towards the point allotment, the priority and the deliverables and should only focus on the logistics of the project, the requirement for the deadline and where the tasks are in the timeline. He is instrumental in the daily stand up meetings.

The meeting structure in the standardized Agile was manipulated to meet the needs of the team. Sprint planning is supposed to be for 3 hours. It should be conducted in a specific manner. Each task which is pre assigned and pushed to the sprint from the backlog by the product owner (PO) should be allotted points based on the opinion of each and every team member. This standard way of running the meetings took a lot of time in the generation of the sprint. It was not fruitful as many of the team members were not completely aware of the tasks that the task owner was assigned. We reduced the time spent in sprint planning meetings to an hour by pre-assigning and pre-Grading the priority and the severity of a task. This helped in bringing the sprint planning timeline down from 3 hours to an hour.

In a graphics hardware team, any minor interrupt or bug fix can span from 2-3 days. In a standardized Agile, there are daily stand up meetings. However, due to this constraint, the daily stand up meetings were scrapped two meetings per week. This resulted in saving time as well as eliminated unproductive status updates.

Previously traditional methodology had a performance analysis model, which was compared with the newer model of the Agile implemented era of the hardware team. This change in the methodology for the company gave a clear vision and a short-term goal for the team. The updated subjective agile planning methodology proved to be effective in increasing the overall performance of the team. The findings are discussed later in the discussed with the help of a table.

Agile-PMBOK Hybrid methodology

Discussing another sector of a company where traditional PM methods like PMBOK and the previously discussed waterfall method were used. PMBOK strategy has five fundamentals associated with it. These are Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, Closing.

A new hybrid model introduced is called the Agile Project Management (APM), which consisted of five phases, namely: envision, speculate, explore, adapt and close.

Envision – In this stage, we define the scope of the project and its stackholders. We also outline the product vision and how the team works together.

Speculate – In this stage, we plan and explore the vision and the cours of the project is determined. Explore – In this stage, in short iterations, the project features are determined, scheduled, implemented, validated and dispensed.

Close – A closeout report is compiled with the summary of the project deliverables and the client satisfaction report.

Agile-Waterfall Hybrid

The following discussion is to propose a hybrid Agile-Hybrid methodology and research on the performance analysis of the adopted hybrid methodology. As discussed previously, the waterfall methodology is a sequential development process following a downward process in phase execution. The phases include analysis, design, implementation, verification, and maintenance.

The traditional waterfall model might be beneficial for some sectors of the company like construction, but for software and hardware development, it proves to be inflexible. This particular model is not incremental in nature and lacks a dynamic atmosphere, which is conducive to the success of software and hardware planning and development. The agile methodology circumnavigates around these hardships. It accepts fluctuating resource requirements and further decreases the time-to-market significant with the traditional methodologies. The hybrid of both agile and the traditional water fall combines the system development life cycle as the waterfall model, at the time, similar to agile, every stage is distributed into repetitions. The agile-waterfall hybrid model is proved to be beneficial and preferable for both large and small companies.