I have been running projects since the late 1980's and early 1990's.  Mostly technical projects within companies that provided a wide variety of professional or consulting services.  This is ofcourse, long before the fornalized approaches that we apply to project management today - predominantly Waterfall and Agile.  I quickly learned that no two projects are alike and that even in similar projects, customers needs tend to change the longer the project takes.

Over the past decade methodologies have greatly matured, and in the software / application / web development world, most projects are run in one of two forms - Waterfall or Agile. 

When I worked in a coporate technology department, using a strict Agile or Scrum method proved to be highly effective - providing the maximum flexibility to user needs.  With a fixed corporate budget cap, the users could and would control the feature sets.  If a budget was insufficient and the project backlog long enough, the users could go back to their funding sources for an increase in budget.

With the iterative approach to the development cycles our in house corporate users were able to quickly approve and use an application that was continuously being updated with new functions and features.

Now, moving back into the consulting side of things, Agile is a much more difficult approach to offer a client who has bid out a project to any number of vendors.  How do you sell a client a project with no clear definition of the start and end game?  How do you even price out the project?  Can you truly keep, budget and bill a client for a fixed Agile Team for the entire length of a project?  And, how can you asure the client that you have understood the project needs without the typical Waterfall level of documentation?

Well, as the Project Management Institute (of which I am a practising member) moves forward with the new certification of Agile Project Manager, I have begun to seriously consider how I can provide the benefits of the Agile method to clients who are asking us to bid on their projects.  I believe the answer lies in a hybrid of the Waterfall and Agile (Scrum) methods, lets all call it the SrumFall method (sorry, I can't take credit for the name!). 

Your thoughts?

Richard Tesmer, Director of Professional Services
PMP
Senior Project Manager