Agile Methods and Hybrid Process Models

Everyone is talking about terms such as agility, agile mindset, agile transformation, working agile, agile project management or agile methods at the moment. A lot of organizations want to join the ride and become agile immediately, following the New Work hype (a collective term used for forward-looking and purposeful work) and getting involved in self-organized ways of working. Very often agility is then an immediate synonym for methods like Scrum, a process model based on the perception that it is a lot easier to digest a small bite rather than a big one or Kanban (originally developed by Toyota to optimize the material flow). In the peoples’ minds lots of buzzwords start to mingle leading to total confusion as to what agility, working agile or agile project management really means. This is reason enough to look behind the scenes of agility in one way or the other.