Hybrid Agile Delivery Approach And SAP
Though the concept of agility in project management existed in some form in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘Agile’ became more mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1990s, based on the principles of Lean manufacturing, Jeff Sutherland developed a radically different method for software development and later, with the help of Ken Schwaber, he formalised the method, naming it Scrum.
Agile product development evolved over time after the IT industry realised that the traditional Waterfall approach is not the right fit for software development. The rate of change, as well as disruption, was deemed too fast to be anchored with the traditional approach.
In this blog, I will try to portray the evolution of Agile and Hybrid delivery approaches in two sections.
Agility in Project Management — The Background
“Trying to manage a project without project management is like trying to play a football game without a game plan.” — Karen Tate
The above quote highlights the significance of project management and it is even more important to plan projects, be it in information technology or any other sector.
Project management became a formal discipline decades ago. The Project Management Institute has been a flag-bearer for setting up standards and best practices. The first Project Management Professional (PMP) certification was done in 1984 and since then, thousands of professionals from various industries passed it, including IT professionals, as it somehow became a gold standard.
The traditional Waterfall approach was considered as best practice across various industries that included upfront detailed planning, collection and analysis of requirements followed by high-level and detailed design, development, testing and productionising the change. This approach worked successfully in various industries until recently when managers started to question its suitability for software application development, where the rate of change is high. IT professionals started looking for more productive approaches to manage changes in scope and to best serve the needs of the market and stakeholders.
This led to the discovery of the Agile method, which focuses on delivering customer value with short iterations and with frequent feedback loops. Toyota Production System remains ancestral to many Agile and flow-based development approaches and the continuous improvement, or ‘kaizen’, philosophy was something that took the limelight during any discourse related to Agile. Toyota emphasised more and more on people rather than systems alongside reducing waste which shaped its success.
In the Agile method, smaller cross-functional teams aim to deliver the work in sprints or iterations. This approach led the way for many Agile at scale methods to expand Agile practices across large organisations where SAFe, Scrum of Scrums, Scrum @ Scale, LeSS, Nexus and Disciplined Agile made the mark in the IT industry.
If we look back at the Agile manifesto created in 2001, it starts with the principle of “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and that is the key to developing great products or systems. The evolution of these practices led to the manifesto’s development by like-minded IT professionals who differed from the traditional Waterfall approach as software development is very different from typical engineering projects in construction or other sectors.
What is the Hybrid Approach
The industrialisation of Agile started in 2001. Since then, resistance has been building up against its application instead of focusing on self-organising and choosing tailored ways suitable for the situation and work environment.
Hybrid ways of working have also been introduced in many organisations where teams can pick and choose what works well with a mix of practices from the Waterfall and Agile approaches. The Hybrid approach includes thorough planning and analysis of requirements, followed by iterating design, dev and unit test within iterations or sprints and finishing with the traditional approach for UAT and productionising changes. The end-to-end project management and delivery responsibility lie with the project manager and with the Scrum master running the sprint cycle and coaching cross-functional team. Here is a glimpse of the difference between Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid approaches.
The Hybrid approach also varies with the context and environment, in which a company is operating and depends on the type of product as well as the size of the project. In certain instances, new product development is taken as a project with a combination of largely traditional planning practices and some Agile touch. However, once the product is built, all future enhancements and releases are then planned by applying more Agile practices and less traditional ways. This is also because upfront planning considers detailing all the risks whilst breaking down the work and developing Work Breakdown Structure. Once all risks are identified with planned mitigation actions and dependencies spelled out, it then allows for better sequencing of work packages and a delivery approach to design, build and test the work via time-boxed iterations.
Based on my past experiences while working in many large organisations and discussing in-practice methodologies with many professionals, I’ve found that a majority of projects don’t use fully traditional nor pure Agile approaches. Instead, the approach is tailored according to the need of the project, using elements from both traditional and Agile approaches.
Organisations seek an understandable roadmap to improve their approach to successful project management. The success of a project is gauged by established project outcome measures, including requirements/scope, schedule, budget, quality and customer satisfaction, according to Project Management Institute, 2017.
In large organisations, there are a lot of interconnecting pieces of the puzzle in the shape of interfaces, systems, data conversion, security protocols, integrations and operations. These components add to the complexity of the projects to deliver specified outcomes and benefits with an aggressive timeline.
In such situations, a Hybrid approach might serve the purpose best because it allows choosing context-specific elements from both traditional and Agile approaches and tailoring them as per the project’s needs. Hybrid project management has probably yielded much more success for large projects but not many studies have been conducted to measure the success rates.
SAP Project Frameworks
Hybrid and Agile methodologies have also been adopted by SAP in its core set of project management methodologies, ‘Accelerated SAP’ (ASAP) and ‘Activate’. Let’s take a look at how these relate to PMI’s project management body of knowledge.
ASAP
ASAP is a Waterfall methodology that includes project preparation, blueprint, realisation, final preparation and go-live.
Project preparation is more like initiation that includes identifying the project objectives, obtaining approvals from stakeholders and sponsors, high-level scope, schedule and mobilising resources. Blueprint, meanwhile, is more of a business blueprint that details the current business process, to-be business process and specifications for implementation.
The next stage is realisation, where the configuration of SAP gets initiated and serves as a baseline followed by fine-tuning and preparing the quality assurance environment like production.
During final preparation, extensive functional, stress, workload and integration testing is performed along with data migration.
The last phase is go-live, where production support and training kicks off. The five-phase approach ensures a quality check is done prior to moving to the next stage and all deliverables are being produced with the right rigour.
Activate
With the advancements made in the IT industry and the introduction of many Agile and Lean frameworks, SAP also launched its Activate project management methodology in 2015, which is more aligned with Agile and iterative practices. It has six phases: discover, prepare, explore, realise, deploy and run.
Discover and prepare stages are to enable customers’ onboarding and identify solution and deployment approaches to be taken with comparing and analysing customer needs with solution capabilities whilst also assessing configuration requirements.
Explore stage explores best practices and tailored customer-specific scope of work based on the context and end-to-end business processes. An evaluation is done to understand and decide on the best available configuration and customisation needs.
The realise phase includes migration, integration and configuration extension through iterative cycles. This is where backlog gets broken down and small chunks of work get delivered and signed off by customers including unit, integration, string and user acceptance testing (UAT).
Once signed off for UAT, the change is then deployed into production during deployment. The last phase, run, includes a continuous learning path going forward with running operations.
You will notice that SAP ‘Activate’ is a flexible methodology that encompasses Waterfall and Agile elements and could be considered a Hybrid methodology. If you are working on an e-Commerce project, a marketing solution, a sales or service channel or looking to implement a customer data solution, you can find detailed guidelines by SAP through the Customer Experience Solutions Project Framework Selector. Depending on the solution, the Activate methodology is tweaked and tailored to best fit the needs with provisioning templates for assessment, comparison, migration, etc. For each solution, specific project/customer resources are available to help deliver business outcomes.
What makes it relevant and aligned with Agile practices is the statement that scope can be variable and highest value features can be delivered first via time-boxing and iterations. Acceptance criteria can be defined for each iteration and quality must be baked in.
For SAP e-Commerce, Sales & Service Solutions and S/4HANA, the above diagram summarises the flow of work whilst this is different for upgrade projects since upgrade is usually shorter than the first implementation. The above framework helps reduce the complexity and uncertainty whilst delivering the projects with planned outcomes and benefits.
Conclusion
Hybrid project management approach is here to stay with key focus on compliance, DevOps, SecOps and descaling Agile practices at the team level. Management and project sponsors should be influenced and made aware of best practices to ensure the alignment between multiple teams is happening at scale.
However, no matter which method is applied, leadership and cultural aspects of an organisation play a significant part in a project’s success. Tools and methodologies are just a means to the end or outcome. Project managers should engage relevant stakeholders during the initiation stage of a project to ensure that the expectations for delivery are clear and the outcomes have been identified and defined to meet the success criteria.
References
- https://www.pmi.org/
- https://agilemanifesto.org/
- https://www.scrum.org/
- https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/production-system/
- Accelerating outcomes with a hybrid approach within a waterfall environment
- A hybrid intelligent system to facilitate information system project management activities
- Agile, Traditional, and Hybrid Approaches to Project Success: Is Hybrid a Poor Second Choice?
- The Role and Characteristics of Hybrid Approaches to Project Management in the Development of Technology-Based Products and Services
- Table: Characteristics of Project Management Approaches
