Does a Hybrid Approach of Agile and Plan-Driven Methods Work Better for IT System Development Projects?

Takeomi Imani. et al.et al. Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Application www.ijera.com
ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 7, Issue 3, ( Part -4) March 2017, pp.39-46
www.ijera.com DOI: 10.9790/9622- 0703043946 39 | P a g e
Does a Hybrid Approach of Agile and Plan-Driven Methods Work
Better for IT System Development Projects?
Takeomi Imani*
, Masaru Nakano*
, and Vittal Anantatmula**
* (Graduate School of System Design and Management, Keio University, Japan)
** (School of Economics, Management, and Project Management, Western Carolina University, USA)
ABSTRACT
With a focus on large-scale IT system development projects in diverse enterprises, this research suggests that a
hybrid approach combining agile and plan-driven management methods should fit in a wider context of specific
project characteristics. Although the extant research illuminates the advantages of the hybrid approach, very few
empirical studies actually suggested that the hybrid approach can improve the likelihood of project success. This
research results show that the hybrid approach should be more scalable than the agile method, and that the hybrid
approach can provide better cost-benefit ratios compared to the traditional plan-driven method. These quantita-
tive and qualitative findings offer a practical recommendation for the project manager or the project management
office to utilize the hybrid approach appropriately.
Keywords - Hybrid Approach, Agile, Plan-driven, Survey, Case Study, Project
I. INTRODUCTION
It is common in IT system development
projects for project managers to deal with both
project control issues and fast responses to changes
in the project. The challenge in managing system
development and IT projects comes from the fact
that diverse stakeholders seek both predictability in
the project scope and flexibility in the requirements
due to uncertain and changing business circums-
tances. Furthermore, system development is often
positioned as a critical subsystem in complex and
large-scale hardware product development projects,
wherein innovative outcomes are expected expedi-
tiously while phase gates are applied to mitigate
risks. In this case, agile methods alone may not be
sufficient to produce desired results. Therefore, it is
no surprise that research shows a trend of studies
focusing a hybrid approach that uses plan-driven and
agile-method together in enterprise level IT system
development [1, 2, 3].
However, there are, to the authors’ know-
ledge, very few empirical studies to support that the
hybrid approach can improve to the likelihood of
project success. To address this knowledge gap, this
paper is intended to provide an integrative empirical
study of the hybrid approach using statistical data
analysis of survey respondents (n = 117) and two
qualitative case studies in Japan.
The objective of this research is to provide
quantitative and qualitative evidence through actual
project result data to illustrate that the hybrid ap-
proach works better than traditional plan-driven or
agile methods for improving specific project success
indicators. The hybrid approach has been hig-
hlighted as an important area for future research in
recent studies on system engineering and project
management disciplines [2, 3, 4, 5]. The results pre-
sented herein contribute to estimating costs and ben-
efits of the hybrid approach compared to those asso-
ciated with the plan-driven method.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
This section presents a review of the existing litera-
ture on plan-driven, agile, and hybrid variants, and
defines the scope of the hybrid approach.
2.1 Plan-driven and Agile Method
Conventional IT system development or-
ganizations selectively utilize two techniques: the
plan-driven method in which requirements are de-
fined and base-lined in the initial phase of the
project [6, 7], and the agile method which is based
on iterative, incremental development of the project
scope [8, 9, 10].
The plan-driven methods, also known as
the Waterfall method, is an IT system development
process that consists of sequential phases that are
RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS

linear. Phases in the plan-driven method typically
include requirements analysis, design, implementa-
tion, testing and operation. These phases require a
sign-off by the project manager to proceed to the
subsequent phases. Requirements are baselined be-
fore design and implementation and implementation
commences using an integrated change control
process [7]. Thus, after finalizing the requirements
in the initial phase, customer involvement is limited.
With the agile method, on the other hand,
re-planning with customers is carried out iteratively
even during the execution phase. Although high-
level requirements can be collected early in the
project, team should repeatedly prioritize detailed
requirements. Agile methodologies include more
than six frameworks and practices [11, 12, 13, 14].
The most popular variants are Scrum [9], Extreme
Programming [15], Crystal [16], Dynamic Systems
Development Method [16], Lean software develop-
ment [17] and Feature Driven Development [18].
The Agile Manifesto [8] consists of four value
statements:
 Individuals and interactions over processes and
tools
 Working software over comprehensive documen-
tation
 Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
 Responding to change over following a plan
Two of the main features of the agile method are
iterative scope definition and development, and in-
cremental delivery [1, 19, 20]. The purpose of agile
project management is to deliver reliable and inno-
vative products within the cost and schedule con-
straints and, to mitigate risks proactively by manag-
ing the uncertainties inherent in the iterative process
[19]. The agile project team must cope with rapid
changes in project plan and active involvement of
customers [21]. Project members should be able to
improve productivity through the iterative incremen-
tal process and the active involvement of key cus-
tomer members in the process [5]. The agile ap-
proach should be suitable for small projects and not
for large-scale projects, but less for large-scale
projects. The recommended number of team mem-
bers is between five and nine [22] to be self-
managed, and it might be not feasible to create the
self-managed team in large-scale projects.
Although there are a few empirical studies
to support the conclusion that the agile method can
improve the likelihood of project success [5], our
preliminary study suggested that agile development
has been applied in the project situations where no-
velty on market, system complexity and likelihood
on large-scale rework (rate of changes [1]) are all
relatively higher [23]. However, the contribution on
the cost-benefits would have been very marginal [5,
23]. This paper will compare project size, rate of
changes, and cost-benefits of hybrid approach, agile
method and plan-driven method.
2.2 Hybrid Approach
Recent research suggests an increasing ten-
dency to use hybrid approach for enterprise level
projects [2, 3, 4, 5]. Consequently, practitioners are
faced with three options: plan-driven, agile methods
and hybrid approaches [2, 3, 24]. For example, in the
field of product development with a high level of
novelty, flexible project management methods along
with concurrent engineering, and spiral models with
prototypes are often considered [25].
The literature review revealed two types of
hybrid approach. The first approach is to use both
traditional plan-driven and agile variants, depending
on the project phase [1, 3, 4, 5, 26]; we denote this
as ―Hybrid by phases.‖ The second alternative in-
volves utilizing mixed methods, via Scrum or XP for
example, or using a plan-driven estimation tool in an
agile development [27, 28, 29, 30]. We refer to this
as ―Hybrid by methods.‖
Additionally, the hybrid approach can be
applied to both IT and non-IT projects. The hybrid
approach would be effective in a large system devel-
opment project where organizational and contractual
issues would hinder the iterative development
process inherent to agile method [3]. On the other
hand, the hybrid approach in a stage-gate model con-
text is often used in hardware product development
projects undertaken by small companies [2]. Due to
the increasing number of practitioners’ articles [3,
31, 32], this paper will focus on ―Hybrid by phases‖
(Fig 1) for IT system development projects.
Although we could only identify few em-
Fig 1. Hybrid approaches

pirical studies which support the idea that hybrid
approaches can improve the likelihood of project
success, we have proposed an integrated decision-
making flow with 13 input parameters for project
managers to comprehensively properly plan and
execute such an approach [33]. Through the litera-
ture review, our decision tree suggests that the hybr-
id approach can be applicable in large-scale projects
with higher requirement uncertainties. For our em-
pirical study in this paper, it is hypothesized that:
(H1) The hybrid approach can be scalable for
projects with high levels of requirement uncer-
tainties.
(H2) The hybrid approach can improve project suc-
cess rates.
III. STATISTICAL DATA ANALYSIS
This section documents our data collection methods
and the statistical data analysis results in order to
evaluate the two hypotheses stated above.
3.1 Data Collection
To investigate properties of projects that
use hybrid approaches, we designed an online ques-
tionnaire in order to collect data from practitioners;
specifically, project managers and project team
members in Japan. The questionnaire was distributed
to potential respondents between March and June in
2015; several project management and agile devel-
opment communities were targeted, as well as the
authors’ professional networks. Similar approaches
to data collection have been utilized in previous stu-
dies into agile methods [5, 34]. The questionnaire
has several sections with 70 questions in total in
order to enable integrative analysis: respondent
attributes (demographics), project attributes, project
characteristics, project results, and project manage-
ment methods. The project characteristics, actual
results, and project management methods were eva-
luated with ordinal 5-point Likert scales. The ques-
tionnaire and descriptive analysis are provided in
Appendix A. In a previous study [23], the authors
demonstrated the relationships between project suc-
cess factors and agile methods with the same ques-
tionnaire; however, this paper focuses on the hybrid
approach.
Fig 2. Dendrogram using Ward linkage
(Dashed line is to determine the number of clusters)

We collected survey responses from 117
individuals, excluding 27 responses due to missing
values. Respondents represented companies which
were large (more than 10,000 employees, 27%),
medium (500–10,000 employees, 40%), and small
(less than 500 employees, 38%). In total 50% of the
projects involved more than 20 team members, while
the duration of 50% of projects exceeded 1 year.
However, 70% of respondents were project manag-
ers and 70% of them had over 10 years’ experience
in project management.
3.2 Statistical Analysis Result
Our hierarchical cluster analysis and one-
way analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis indi-
cated a cluster of hybrid approach which has res-
ponses from both agile and plan-driven methods (Fig
2 and Table 1). Using the rates of the agile and plan-
driven methods (Q15_1 and Q15_2 in Appendix A),
the cluster analysis with Ward methods suggests
three cluster; a chi-squared test rejects the null hypo-
thesis that the data are independent (χ2
=17.28, df=2,
p<.001).
As is evident shown in Table 1, cluster 1
can be identified as hybrid approach since agile
(Q15_12) and plan-driven (Q15_11) methods both
feature to a relatively high extent (p<.000). In addi-
tion, the hybrid approach (cluster 1) were used in the
projects where the rate of requirement changes
(Q10_9) was higher as compared to the pure plan-
driven methods (cluster 3), and where the project
size of projects (Q8) was lager as compared to the
pure agile method (cluster 2). These results support
the first hypothesis (H1) in section II that the hybrid
approach can be scalable for projects with high le-
vels of requirement uncertainties.
In detail, cluster 1 (hybrid) used the plan-
driven methods more than cluster 2 (pure agile) and
leveraged agile method more than cluster 3 (pure
plan-driven). As shown in Table 1, those results can
be found in three plan-driven methods (scoping:
Q15_1, scheduling: Q15_2, and gate review by doc-
ument: Q15_3) and one agile method (gate review
by the working system: Q15_8). In other responses
about plan-driven or agile methods (Q15_# in the
Appendix A), significant differences were not found
among three clusters.
Furthermore, cluster 1 (hybrid) has a larger
average rates of project success on cost (within
budget, Q11_1 in Table 2). Cluster 2 (agile) has
largest average rates on project quality (Q11_1) and
project sponsor identification of the success (Q11_4).
Cluster 3 (plan-driven) has a marginally larger aver-
age rates of project success on duration (on time,
Q11_3). This finding can be extracted through a
descriptive analysis in Table 2. Although one-way
ANOVA F-test cannot provide support in a statistic-
al sense, in descriptive terms Table 2 results margi-
nally support the second hypothesis (H2) described
in section II that the hybrid approach can improve
project success rates, specifically in terms of cost.
Table 1: Methods and project attributes: cluster and ANOVA analysis
Table 2: Project success rates for each cluster with
descriptive analysis
Cluster Means and Standard Deviation
Quality Cost Delivery Sponsor
satisfaction
(Q11_1) (Q11_2) (Q11_3) (Q11_4)
1 (Hybrid) mean 4.04 3.81 3.96 4.19
s.d .908 1.262 3.96 .947
2 (Agile) mean 4.33 3.78 3.78 4.39
s.d .594 1.114 3.78 .608
3 (Plan-driven) mean 3.98 3.52 4.00 4.15
s.d 1.229 1.421 4.00 1.161
All clusters mean 4.06 3.68 3.95 4.21
s.d 1.028 1.312 3.95 1.005

IV. CASE STUDIES
This section provides qualitative evidence through
case studies that used hybrid approaches successful-
ly with specific project properties, and further eva-
luates the two hypotheses in section II.
4.1 Data Collection
We selected two IT system development
projects from two different business organizations
that used hybrid approaches. Data were collected
through interviews; their authenticity was then vali-
dated by accessing publicly available information
such as conference proceedings and articles [3, 35].
Two project managers involved in projects that em-
ployed the hybrid approach were interviewed to col-
lect information for case studies. Main interview
questions aimed to understand (1) needs of key
stakeholders, (2) project characteristics such as size
and duration, (3) project management approach and
its contextual background, (4) issues and measures,
and (5) final results and lessons learned from the
project. Interview scripts were sent to the project
managers ahead of the interviews, followed by 90-
minute face-to-face interviews. These interviews
were held between March and July 2016. These in-
terviews were held between March and July 2016.
The recorded conversations were converted to MS
Word documents and sent to interviewees for corro-
boration.
4.2 Project Alpha
The objective of this large-scale (multiple
teams) global procurement system integration
project in a leading IT technology company. The
objective of that project is to deploy the using a
common procurement process and across interfaces
with major customers in six countries. Although the
highest priority of the stakeholders was to complete
the project within 9 months, approximately 50% of
the requirements have not been well defined. The
project exhibits technical risk in terms of data inter-
faces and cross-country design alignment which
could result in escalated costs to implement the sys-
tem.
To deal with uncertainties and mitigate
risks, the project team adopted a hybrid approach of
plan-driven and agile methods. The initial phase
used the plan-driven method with 2.5 months in-
cluded for defining requirements and high-level de-
sign. The core project team documented detailed
requirements for efficient communication with other
teams. The project leader in the core project team
stated that ―the initial phase was important to offi-
cially reach agreement with all the teams about the
documented architecture and review.‖ In the devel-
opment phase, the core project team used the Scrum
method to respond to changes efficiently. Iteration
developments delivered not only functional require-
ments but also non-functional requirements that are
usually managed by the plan-driven method. The
development phase also incorporated plan-driven
practices such as risk response planning along with
multi-national stakeholders. The project team tried
to manage the coordination with several teams with
a defined architecture document and this plan-
driven-like document contributed to effective itera-
tive development and the success of the project. As
the project manager revealed to us: “Using Scrum
with a light process of change control, we roughly
estimated more than 15% cost (work effort) reduc-
tion. But if we did not agree with the architecture
document in the initial phase, we could not have
identified the source (problem) when they happened
and it would have caused a delay with the release.
The planning approach to avoid those risks was one
of the success factors of this project.”
As summarized in Table 3, this case would
support the two hypotheses (H1) and (H2) in section
II. In a large-scale project alpha that used a hybrid
approach with a plan-driven initial phase and a de-
Table 3: Summary of case study results
Project alpha Project Beta
Scope Procurement system
integration project and
global roll-out
Web-based human
resource management
system.
Size Large (6 team) Small (single team)
Requirement
uncertainty
High
(50% of all requirements)
Middle
(20% of all requirements)
Agile method Scrummethod in the
development phase
Three-week times three
cycle of the iteration
development with 20% cap
of changes
Plan driven
method
Documented detailed
requirements for efficient
communication with other
teams.
Risk response planning
with the defined
architecture document
In the initial phase and
high-level design phase,
quality management
process adopted.
The test phase has
integration and acceptance
test.
Results Successfully completed on
time
Successfully completed on
time
Cost reduction
rates as
compared with
plan-driven
methods
>15%
(estimated)
~8%
(measured)

fined architectural document, the project scope was a
large-scale (multiple teams) global system integra-
tion project. Although approximately 50% of the
requirements have not been well defined, the project
was successfully completed with the Scrum method
in the development phase to reduce change costs.
4.3 Project Beta
The objective of this small-scale (single
team) project in a power supply company was to
implement a web-based human resource manage-
ment system. This project required high-level securi-
ty and rigid authorization control. Further, the sys-
tem interface is needed with other enterprise sys-
tems. Previously, the legacy system was used for
many years, and the specification document of the
legacy system had not been updated for its migration
to the web-based application.
The project management team decided to
use a hybrid approach to deal with the uncertainty
associated with requirements and to ensure high-
level quality assurance. In the initial phase and high-
level design phase, the plan-driven method was
adopted. With uncertainty cone analysis, the cap of
the cost increase was estimated to be 20% of the
total cost. In the detailed design and development
phase, the agile method with three cycles of iterative
development (Scrum) was used. The duration of
each iteration was 3 weeks. The test phase was ex-
ecuted as a plan-driven method. Although 20
changes had to be incorporated, the project finished
on-time and achieved about an 8% cost-reduction as
compared with the plan-driven approach in all the
phases. The project manager of the development
vendor stated: “In the plan-driven method, the cost
would increase by 50% because the rework had to
be done as phase-2 after the first release. In this
hybrid approach, such rework did not happen, since
the customer was requested to attend meetings after
completion of each iteration to review the working of
the system…. the customer’s satisfaction level was
higher in using the hybrid approach than the plan-
driven approach. The users can interact with the
system easily even without the detailed instruction
manual since the detail development was done after
listening to user opinions.‖
As summarized in Table 3, this case further
supports the two hypothesis (H1) and (H2) stated in
section II. In this small project with a high level of
requirement uncertainty, the hybrid approach can be
used. Using agile iterative development and the
plan-driven test phase, the project was successfully
completed on-time with a measured cost-reduction
as compared with the plan-driven approach.
V. DISCUSSION
The objective of this research is to provide
quantitative and qualitative integrative evidence that
hybrid approaches work better than traditional plan-
driven method or agile method. First, both survey
data and the case studies supported the hypothesis
that the hybrid approach can be scalable on project
size (number of teams) for projects with high levels
of requirement uncertainties (H1 in section II). Ex-
isting literature has asserted that pure agile methods
are more common in small single team consisting of
6-10 members [19]. Our case studies were substan-
tively heterogeneous in scale and scope, yet the hy-
brid approach worked well in both (Table 3).
Second, both survey data and the case studies sup-
port the hypothesis that the hybrid approach can
improve project success rates (H2 described in sec-
tion II), specifically with respect to cost. Existing
literature has posited that the pure agile approach
tends to only offer marginal cost improvements [5,
23]. Our case studies showed that the hybrid ap-
proach is expected to provide bigger cost benefit as
compared with the plan-driven method in larger-
scale IT system development projects (Table 3).
These quantitative and qualitative findings
can form the basis of practical recommendations for
project managers or project management offices
(PMO) to appropriately utilize hybrid approaches. In
IT system projects with higher requirement uncer-
tainties and larger numbers of teams, the hybrid ap-
proach combining agile development and plan-
driven requirement definition and tests would in-
crease the likelihood of improving the cost-benefit
ratio by possibly 8–15% as compared with the pure
plan-driven method.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper presented an empirical study of
the usage and benefits of hybrid approaches combin-
ing the agile and traditional plan-driven methods.
Our statistical analysis and case studies provided
quantitative and qualitative integrative evidence that
hybrid approaches work better in larger-scale project
contexts with higher levels of requirement uncertain-

ty. Further, the hybrid approach increases the like-
lihood of improving the cost-benefit ratio, compared
to purely plan-driven methods.
Although these findings may provide prac-
tical insights to appropriately utilize hybrid ap-
proaches, our empirical study has limitations in that
the results may not necessarily generalize beyond
our survey sample and case-study interviewees. Our
past research indicated that the pure agile method
could be used in low-criticality projects and the agile
team would need higher skill on agile iterative de-
velopments [23]. Further empirical research is cer-
tainly warranted to explore and understand the con-
texts and criteria against which these different me-
thods are appropriate.
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Appendix A. Questionnaire (The responses of the underlined questions were analyzed in this paper.)
# Questions
Q1-6 Respondents attributes
Q7-9 Project attributes
Q10_# Project characteristics Mean S.D.
2.94 1.53
2.39 1.46
3.23 1.40
4.33 1.05
3.37 1.29
2.56 1.43
3.06 1.40
3.08 1.34
3.60 1.27
3.10 1.25
2.83 1.69
2.91 1.75
2.33 1.56
2.68 1.78
Q11_# Project results Mean S.D.
4.06 1.01
3.64 1.32
3.91 1.33
4.18 1.03
3.82 1.18
3.99 0.99
2.81 1.45
2.49 1.39
2.29 1.32
2.38 1.38
2.21 1.29
2.56 1.40
Q15_# Project management methods Mean S.D.
2.87 1.52
3.86 1.14
3.63 1.42
3.52 1.33
3.70 1.19
3.45 1.27
3.52 1.19
3.15 1.37
3.33 1.45
3.26 1.27
3.77 1.32
2.22 1.39
Q1. Industory，Q2. Size of organization，Q3.Annual revenue，Q4. Occupation，Q5. Number of PM experiences，Q6. PMP certification
8. Project phase gate reviews were conducted mainly based on working software.
9. Customers of the project were involved in all the project phases.
10. Teammembers had a right to make decisions on how to manage and control the project.
11. Overall, the project management practice of that project was based on traditional (such as Waterfall) approach.
12. Overall, the project management practice of that project was based on Agile one (such as Scrumapproach).
2. Project scope, requirements and the priority were defined in the initiation phase.
3. Project phase gate reviews were based on documents and signed-off.
4. Customers of the project were mainly involved in the requirement and testing phases.
5. Project manager had a governance and control of that project.
6. Overlap of iterative phases of requirement definition, design, development and testing was planned.
7. Requirements were defined and prioritized in all the project phases.
8. A significant amount of efforts of redoing a process or activity (rework) was required due to incorrect solution design.
9. A significant amount of efforts of redoing a process or activity (rework) was required due to incorrect development.
10. Changes to functional requirements led a significant amount of rework.
11. Changes to solution design led a significant amount of rework.
12. Changes to stakeholder needs led a significant amount of rework.
1. Project schedule with sequential phases was planned and executed.
2. Project completed by due date.
3. The deliverable of the project met the quality specifications.
4. Project sponsors considered the project is successful overall.
5. Project teammembers were satisfied with the outcome.
6. End users considered that the project deliverable will provide a high level of business benefits.
7. A significant amount of efforts of redoing a process or activity (rework) was required due to incorrectly defined requirements.
10. A high probability of a significant amount effort of redoing a process or activity (rework) is expected due to solution changes.
11. Project stakeholders including project teamare made up of individuals fromdifferent countries.
12. Project activity locations are geographically dispersed in different countries.
13. Project needs and requirements are collected fromdifferent countries.
14. Project deliverable (products or solutions) are developed by foreign manufactures or service providers.
1. Project completed within budget.
4. Necessary technologies do not exist at the project initiation stage.
5. The products or solutions contain a widely dispersed collection of systems with a common mission.
6. The products or solutions have a complexmulti-layer hierarchy of systems and subsystems.
7. The project completion time is crucial for success.
8. The project have a high-level of project urgency and very much limited available timeframe.
9. A high probability of a significant amount effort of redoing a process or activity (rework) is expected due to requirement
changes.
Q7. Project scope and deliverables (text)，Q8. Number of teammbers，Q9. Duration
1. The project deliverables are new-to-the world products or solutions.
2. Reference market data for the products or solutions does not exist.
3. The project needs to use a wide range of new technology.

Does a Hybrid Approach of Agile and Plan-Driven Methods Work Better for IT System Development Projects?

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