hello everyone i am candice porter and today i'm going to give you a boiled down version of what's the difference between waterfall agile and hybrid project management this will be a relatively quick video just highlighting some of the differences and when you may want to use each of these methodologies so let's get to it [Music] let's start by talking about waterfall project management when we're talking about waterfall project management you may also hear it called traditional or predictive project management they are used interchangeably so if you hear one of those three ways of referring to it then we're all talking about this same methodology now waterfall project management really focuses on developing a plan and really following that plan throughout the project life cycle i'll give you an example of some of the different steps of going through the waterfall methodology and this is really what you're using when you're creating a robust project schedule so a lot of times when you're creating that traditional project schedule in say ms project and you're defining all of your dependencies and building them in and looking at your critical path you're generally using waterfall project management so we are starting at the very beginning and developing that plan executing the plan all the way through now when would you use waterfall project management this is generally used when requirements are well known so building a house building a bridge you can imagine that you'd want to have a full plan developed before you just start building a house or you're going to have a lot of expensive changes throughout that project execution so when requirements are well known this tends to be the best approach let's look a little bit about the way that it flows so it's cold waterfall because you flow from one step into the other so again we're going to gather all of those requirements for our project at the beginning we're then going to create the design what's this going to look and feel like as far as those successful deliverables and outputs and then we're actually going to develop or build the solution whatever those deliverables are we'll test and validate and then we'll go ahead and deploy now there's usually one big outcome whenever we are using waterfall project management so if you think about okay we're building that house we're going to go through all of these we're going to make sure that it meets all of the requirements that we determined in the beginning and then we're going to deploy we're going to hand the keys over to the customer there's that big bang at the end let's look at agile project management [Music] so agile project management is a lot more collaborative when we're talking about the customer and so we're working really closely with them throughout the entire project as we may need to gather some additional requirements as we move along this is best used when requirements are not as well known so this was developed originally for use with software development and didn't really know at the very beginning of the project what it was going to look and feel like as far as that outcome and so waterfall project management really wasn't the best approach so agile was created it really is that collaboration with the customer that is driving the project forward and again software developments where this came about innovative type of projects are really great to use agile project management now this looks and feels a little bit different as far as how you're delivering as well there's something called sprints when you're talking about agile project management and a sprint is really a time box so if you hear the word sprint i want you to think about there's a set amount of time where we need to accomplish specific work and then we're going to deliver part of the project incrementally so a sprint equals a time box we're going to do part of the work deliver something incrementally then we're going to go back into a sprint and deliver some additional work incrementally and so forth until the project is completed i'm going to show you another visual momentarily but just keep that in mind a little bit different from waterfall project management where there's one big outcome at the end this is used oftentimes incrementally when you're creating those deliverables [Music] hybrid project management you probably hear about this quite a bit quite a buzzword these days hey what are best practices for hybrid project management this is really a combined approach and this is generally customized to organizations based on how they're structured the culture of the organization it can be any combination of waterfall and agile and just tailoring it to what meets the needs of the organization the project the team itself so it could switch back and forth between hey maybe this phase of work will be using you know waterfall or traditional or predictive and then maybe we go into a more agile type of phase maybe there's two tracks running at one time you see that oftentimes if there's product development and maybe there's a hardware requirement and a software requirement generally hardware is going to be used with waterfall project management because if you think about it when changes are expensive when there's a lot of kind of physical or tangible items being used with a project then waterfall's generally best so that we can do all of that planning up front and eliminate work and waste because that gets really expensive when we're talking about projects when we're talking about software and making little tweaks here and there there's not as much as far as hey if we need to change something it's not these huge expensive items think for example if you're building a plane a huge aircraft that's going to carry hundreds of passengers if you're really trying to deliver in an incremental way or with agile project management things may change a lot along the way along the course of that project being executed changes are going to get expensive very very quickly if halfway through the project you're changing the design of where the seats go or you're changing something to do with hey let's just add plugs we don't want to add plugs to all the seats and it can be expensive to make changes we want to think of waterfall project management agile maybe the requirements aren't as well known we're working really closely with the customer we are working with sprints delivering increments and then showing it to the customer what do you think does this meet the requirements and then maybe a few tweaks are being made i'll touch on that more momentarily again hybrid we're talking about a combination what works best for this project let's design an approach and maybe use a little bit of waterfall a little bit of agile with waterfall project management you generally use a traditional work breakdown structure so when you're in that planning phase we are going to think about what are all of the deliverables associated with this project so if you look at 1.0 here what is this deliverable what is the work that we're going to need to do in order to get this deliverable completed that's going to be our task generally tasks start with a verb and we want to keep breaking it down to the lowest level so that it can be accurately estimated as far as time cost resources that need to be assigned what we then do with the work breakdown structure is think about dependencies okay in what order does this work need to be accomplished does task 2.1 need to be completed before 3.2 and we start putting them in order and linking those dependencies that starts to give us that picture moving over time of when the work's going to get completed and that's also how we come up with our critical path when we're using agile project management we generally have something called a backlog sometimes you'll hear it called a project backlog or a product backlog this is where we're gathering as many requirements as possible and we are prioritizing what are kind of the must-haves here that's going to go to the top of our list what are maybe the should haves they're going to go next on the list what are maybe the could haves and then what are the won't haves so oftentimes you're going to be prioritizing all of the requirements putting them in order in something called a backlog what we then do is align the work usually pulling from the top of the list the highest priority items we're going to pull those out and put them into a sprint backlog sprints are generally two weeks in duration although they can range from one to four weeks within the project they should stay the same duration from sprint to sprint to sprint so you want to agree on what's the duration of our sprints at the beginning of the project again let's say we're using two-week sprints we're going to say how much work based on our project team if we've got five people working on the project and their dedicated resources how much of this work can we get completed in a two-week period and we're going to estimate align that to the sprint itself and then all five team members we're going to be heads down doing the work for that two-week period trying to get it a hundred percent complete then we are going to have our project or product increment what is it that we accomplished during that last sprint we're generally going to showcase it to our customer have some discussions and if everyone's thumbs up we're going to go back pull again from the top of the list since it's in priority order align that to the next sprint as far as the work goes and continue on sometimes when we showcase our increment to the customer they may say that's not exactly what i expected or oh maybe we didn't think about this let's add some additional requirements so if you add some additional requirements to your backlog then you need to re-prioritize and that way you're always pulling the highest priority items or the ones that are going to add the most value so in a nutshell waterfall traditional predictive project management best for well-known requirements we're going to develop our entire plan at the beginning of the project before we ever start doing any work and we're going to have our start date end date of our project we're going to measure against that baseline this is our original plan our baseline as we move throughout which is going to tell us hey are we ahead of schedule behind schedule are we within budget are we over budget that's going to be our traditional or waterfall project management for agile requirements generally aren't as well known and we're working really closely with the customer throughout execution via sprints just one note here when we're talking about agile project management dedicated resources tends to work best you will often hear people talk about scrum if you hear that know that scrum is an agile approach for executing projects there's really specific names when we start talking about the different roles that they use within scrum i have another video called what is agile project management where we dig in a bit deeper so if you are interested in learning more about agile project management please watch that video okay this is really just meant to be a high-level overview i've had quite a few questions on hey what's the difference when would you use them i hope that this answers those questions and please leave me a comment below or ask me some questions below love to hear from you again i am candace porter would love it if you subscribe to this channel by clicking the little bell i'll continue to deliver project management focused videos that's what this channel is all about thanks for being here with me today [Music] you