Hybrid approach is more about a process and an initiative to design teams and organize work. It demands accountability and increased communication and collaboration between team members and with all stakeholders to ensure the project is staying on track. It also requires some great investment in establishing an effective process along with skilled resources and effective tools. It takes patience and an art of handling resistance to the change.
When we talk Hybrid approach, we talk about the fact of combining the Agile methods with other non-Agile techniques. We are identifying those techniques that achieve high degrees of delivery along with high degrees of adaptability. For example, a detailed requirements effort, followed by sprints of incremental delivery would be a Hybrid approach. Likewise, frequent iterative prototyping of a design, followed by a single plan-driven implementation would be a Hybrid approach.
Adopting a hybrid approach frame of mind and being welling to adapt to changing conditions is what success is made of in today’s world. In this case study, we try to highlight a model of an incremental and an iterative delivery of a project while shifting the culture mindset to support such model. The case study will shed the light on the business goals of a leading QSR organization (Quick Service Restaurant) in terms of adapting to digital technology to rapidly create new business capabilities and interactions with their customers. It will also explain how tradeoff sliders helped in determining and defining the right balance of the hybrid approach execution model including the incremental delivery, the MVP concept, teams structures, practices, culture, etc. along with the recipe for delivering a quality product. It also sheds the light on the Build, Measure, and Learn concept, and how delivering something half-baked into production can make a huge difference.
The ultimate goal should always be to deliver the right business outcome using the right techniques. While doing agile techniques is not the goal, the case study will show us how to bake in quality from the start along with best practices while project timeline is moving to the right. This way, we are helping finding issues as early as possible, reducing costs and risks, avoiding any rework or redesign, and ensuring stability.
By Ibrahim Taha
Delivery Principal - Agile Coach, Thoughtworks (United States)