The Virtues of Project Tailoring Can Settle Work-From-Home Debates

You may very well be new to the project management community. But for those of us who’ve been in the profession awhile, we’ve witnessed a hype around agile project methodologies come and, in large part, go.

Previously, predictive methodologies were the norm in project management. When projects are planned predictively, detailed planning happens at the beginning of the project. As a predictive project progresses, modifications to the plan are cumbersome and discouraged in the name of keeping the project smooth. But as the pace of marketplace change has increased in recent decades, a project methodology was needed to embrace and respond to that change rather than resist it. Agile methodologies offer an organized way to delay planning until much closer to when individual work items happen, ensuring the work performed is responding to the most up-to-date conditions.

Because agile methodologies offer many unique benefits that predictive methodologies do not, there was a season when many companies—even CEOs personally—got excited about agile and mandated a complete transformation of their companies from 100% predictive methods to 100% agile methods. Some companies found success, but when the dust settled many project managers and team members felt they’d moved from the mandated use of one okay-fitting tool to the mandated use of another okay-fitting tool.

Some ideas have followed more quietly, but steadily and confidently, in the wake of the agile hype. One is a deeper recognition that a project methodology is just a tool. In addition, project managers find that a hybrid of predictive and agile methodologies is a better-fit tool in some cases. And on top of all this, a project manager can provide more value when they’re empowered to tailor the project management methodology to whatever best fits the project or company—putting together bits and pieces from predictive methods, agile methods, or whatever else they find effective in their setting.

These ideas were captured well in PMI’s book Choose Your WoW! (WoW = way of working), first published in 2019, and have only increased in prominence in the project management community. The popularity of tailored hybrid methodologies and the effectiveness of projects across methodologies is the first theme in PMI’s 2024 Pulse of the Profession report.

I’m very compelled by the idea of fit-for-project or fit-for-company project methodologies. I experience their value in my own setting, and I enjoy talking through a clunky project process with a team like a therapist and offering ideas for how we can make things smoother for them while maintaining project outcomes. It’s satisfying to reduce friction in people’s jobs and/or make their work more impactful.

All this being said, I’m struck by the parallels between the predictive vs. agile project debates and the work-from-home vs. work-in-the-office debates that have been playing out since COVID without, in my observation, a satisfying society-level resolution. I’ve read a number of articles about different perspectives on the topic crystalizing in different companies, sometimes with employee and senior leadership perspectives deadlocked against each other.

I’m sure it’s no accident that the second topic in PMI’s 2024 Pulse of the Profession report this year is working location. PMI finds that effectiveness of collocated vs. distributed work, when measured/averaged across companies and industries, does not universally impact the success of projects to a meaningful degree. The point I’m about to make here is one PMI subtly makes in the report, but I think it deserves to be made more loudly.

The debate between predictive and agile methodologies has matured and found its resolution in tailoring—in empowering talented professionals to cherry-pick the helpful aspects of both methodology types and create a fit-for-purpose solution that best serves the needs of the project or company.

In the same way, I think the debate about work location can and will eventually stop being a debate, but should and will be viewed as a set of tools or options that talented professionals (at the project level, the senior leadership level, or elsewhere in the company) can choose from, tailoring their project or company work-location mix to whatever best meets business goals.

Maybe a whole company will be in the office, or a whole company will be remote, but I think we will see more and more hybrid scenarios where some roles are in a centralized location but others aren’t, or transporting people to be physically together will be balanced with video calls, or temporary staff will be increasingly utilized when a company needs to be able to flex between staff that is or isn’t collocated.

We do already see these things happening, but the tension between better or worse, right or wrong use of collocated staff remains. The smart project leaders and company leaders will set this tension aside sooner, and see this scenario positively: because remote work is easier than it used to be, we now have more options that might be leveraged to meet project and company goals.

Debates at your workplace may not be settled immediately, but as a project leader, you can make this shift in your own mind and in your language today and start to influence those around you. People will find it refreshing to rally together around a goal rather than be stuck in opposition to each other. And if you’re persuasive, your projects may benefit from a more optimal work-location mix as well.