New Research: Hybrid Approaches Work Best

In our study The Adaptive Organization 2024, one finding stood out: organizations have gone all in on hybrid project management, and they are achieving more success because of that adoption. Because we asked a similar set of questions about the adoption of agile, hybrid, and predictive methods back in 2018, we can see the clear trends emerging:

• 37% of organizations used hybrid approaches in 2024, as opposed to only 22% in 2018.
• Organizations reported a 10% increase in their capability at using adaptive and hybrid approaches.
• High-performing organizations were more likely to use hybrid approaches, at 40%; they also reported significantly higher increases in capability with these approaches. Comparing the performance of high performers in 2018 vs 2024, we see that their overall performance rating was 17% higher this year, especially in productivity improvement, which jumped by 23%.

It seemed obvious to me from the beginning of this study in 2018 that the best-performing organizations were going to master the art of choosing just the right mix of predictive and agile methods for each project, and the data bears out my hunch. There’s very little in life that works well under a rigid black-or-white system (i.e. “Agile for Everything!” vs. “Agile is a Hoax”) and projects, with their wide variety of circumstances, constantly changing requirements, myriad stakeholders, and disparate industry applications, are surely a fertile field for experimentation with these approaches.

Looking a bit closer at the specific adaptive practices that the high performers used most often, we see some familiar themes:

1. Transparency is key; these organizations promote transparency and work in a safe and honest environment.
2. Stakeholders are significantly involved throughout the project
3. Communication about evolving and emerging details is frequent and rapid
4. Empirical measurements, small experiments, and learning are encouraged
5. As the project progresses, work may be reprioritized based on improved understanding of risk exposure.

Trust and communication play a large role in the success of these organizations, allowing them to be flexible and open to new information. Not found in the data, but in reading between the lines, I’d say this sounds like a pretty great place to work. And that’s a theme of our upcoming white paper on how changing approaches to project management can remedy some of our resource management headaches in the future. Stay tuned!