Predictive vs Adaptive Project Management — What’s your pick?
Predictive Project management has one primary delivery of the final product at the end of the project schedule and has little tolerance for change. This would not work well for a company having projects with dynamic requirements and an agile atmosphere, where a decentralized release methodology is followed. Often such companies start out with a certain feature and build it to a point where few users can gradually test it. Even at this point, not all aspects of this feature are developed and companies gauge responses to see what customers would like or dislike. There are times when a feature needs to be scrapped totally. In such cases, a lean framework will allow them to drop doing something that doesn’t add value. In an adaptive model, they do identify a final “awesome” situation but still focus on just few “next steps” to reach an intermediate target towards that goal. A predictive model, on the other hand, has a detailed project plan in place.
Therefore, it is essential that the culture within the company supports the predictive model based on the projects they work on. Predictive management starts of by ensuring that the solution and goal are clear from the beginning. These methodologies also work well for companies, who know their resultant product clearly. A predictive model lies in an area of lower degree of change and lower frequency of delivery. Companies that believe in building a minimum viable product, performing AB testing , tweaking along the way depending on what is desired by the end user and focusing more on innovation rather than predictability, use an Adaptive model.
A predictive model would focus on large releases with a huge “blast radius”. In these cases the blast radius impacts a large number of end users. An Adaptive framework has a frequent prototype model for their business needs. So much so that sometimes they believe that “100% of predictability means 0% of innovation”. Their experiment friendly culture doesn’t coincide with the needs of a predictive model i.e. having a fixed scope.
Both models have their benefits, which come to light when used with the appropriate project in a firm that has a culture aligned to support it!
