Unlike what automatically comes to mind nowadays upon hearing the word “hybrid” – a work environment combining remote and in-office workers – the term “hybrid methodology in project management” stands for something else. Hybrid project management brings together two or more different approaches to project management, typically Waterfall and Agile, allowing traditional teams and Agile teams to collaborate seamlessly and effortlessly.   

Web-based business tools provider Zoho allows integration between their classic project management platform, Zoho Projects, and their Agile project management tool, Zoho Sprints, to promote and facilitate hybrid project management for enterprises.  

Saranya Ganesan, Senior Product Manager at Zoho, shares the key challenges of the hybrid methodology and explains how the integration helps teams face them optimally. 

The Challenges

“There are various challenges companies face while working on complex projects that incorporate both classical and Agile teams,” Saranya notes. “The diversity of approaches and work methods tends to make collaboration more complicated.” 

Among the most common challenges when it comes to hybrid project management are:

• Planning project budgets 
• Designing and automating workflows and tasks 
• Maintaining real-time cross-team and cross-platform synchronization 
• Getting actionable insights on progress, identifying issues and bottlenecks  
• Maximizing efficiency   

“The integration we’ve created between Zoho Projects and Zoho Sprints allows companies to easily overcome those challenges and optimize cross-team collaboration,” Saranya says. 

Hybrid Project Management with Zoho: How Does It Work?

“In project management, different types of teams take different types of approaches to task completion,” Saranya explains. 

“While more traditional teams tend to do it sequentially, Agile teams normally work in sprints, which follow a different work process. Our integration supports teams wanting to utilize the hybrid methodology in order to bring those two different worlds together.”  

Here are some of the key hybrid capabilities provided by the Projects-Sprints integration: 

• Turning tasks into user stories – rather than different types of teams having to adapt and adjust to fit together, with Zoho, classical teams can continue adding tasks to their list the way they are used to. Once complete, all they have to do is add them as user stories to the backlog, allowing Agile teams to use them for their sprints.
• Planning and tracking sprints – even though classical and Agile teams will normally work on different project management platforms, Zoho’s integration allows both types of teams to plan and track sprints from a mutual Sprint tab, making collaboration much easier.
• Minimizing disintegration, facilitating collaboration – being part of a big team, not to mention, a group of teams, means that many different aspects must be always considered. The integration between Projects and Sprints ensures continuous synchronization between all the various aspects having to do with both classical and Agile teams to avoid unnecessary errors or misunderstandings and make mutual work smoother.
• Getting a clear view of the progress – Zoho offers a bird’s-eye view of the project’s milestones, tasks, and sprints for both classical and Agile teams, allowing them to track progress simultaneously and be on the same page. 

“Ultimately, our goal is to allow the best internal collaboration experience possible for teams coming from different approaches to project management, making for utmost efficiency and optimal outcomes,” Saranya concludes. 

Learn more about Zoho’s hybrid project management suite here.