High Five: Five Pillars of a New Kind of Software
Chapter 4: Hybrid

cplace Day is just around the corner — fortunately, we still have enough time to dig into the fourth core ingredient of our cplace magic in the latest part of our blog series.
If you have missed the chapters 1, 2 and 3, don’t worry — just follow the links.
Even more important — if you have not registered for the cplace Day 2019 yet, be fast and don’t miss out. We only have a few spots available by now: Register for cplace Day now (it’s free!)
A fair share of enterprises already goes hybrid — more or less. In times of increasing software components in most products, companies increasingly set on agile project management methods in their development teams and quickly started to appreciate a large number of benefits. However, while many software development teams work agile now, conventional project management methods remain to be the more advantageous choice for departments, that operate in a more standardized environment with many project stakeholders and strict compliance rules. Therefore, enterprises often do not strive for a complete agile transformation. Rather, they want to combine the conventional and agile PM world and ensure an efficient and reliable flow of information between them.
Unfortunately, the software market has no adequate answer on how to properly support these hybrid organizational structures and important questions remain unanswered: How can the agile and traditional project management world be connected? How can the seamless flow of information be ensured? And, how can you scale agile approaches beyond the team level to roll out its benefits over the entire organization?
We support enterprises in tackling these challenges and developed solution modules to successfully combine and scale agile and traditional methods.
Step 1: Mixing Methods
This one is a no-brainer, but it is vital: To connect and scale the agile and conventional project management world, you have to enable a mix of both methods. A mix, that not only allows these two worlds to coexist but one, that proactively integrates and combines them.
cplace already supported the use of different project management methods in the past. However, now, we take mixing methods to a whole new level by providing Hybrid Gantt and Hybrid Board. These solutions support a mix of conventional and agile methods — data from both worlds can be integrated and managed in one solution.
In addition to that, cplace is also able to integrate data from other systems. This way, information can be managed seamlessly and beyond the limits of just one project or software solution, and (agile) teams can collaborate and exchange information cross-system.
Step 2: Data Modeling
The distinguishing foundation of cplace is its uniform, yet flexible data model, which ensures high data quality. This data model itself is hybrid. What does that mean? You can feed your powerful cplace data model with structured, unstructured or semi-structured data and it is able to process and visualize all this data, for example in the Hybrid Gantt, Hybrid Board or in Loomeo, an application, that visualizes dependencies and therefore helps to manage complexity. Such a consistent and hybrid data model is a crucial foundation to ensure reliable and efficient software support for your projects.
Besides the capability of the data model to process data with different levels of structure, cplace also connects information from various data worlds — this function will be subsumed in the next paragraph.
Step 3: Connecting Project, Process and Product Data
This aspect is another important piece of our hybrid mosaic — while different data can be handled by cplace, it is also important to connect different data worlds, i.e. the project, product and process world. This plays out in our Hybrid Gantt, for example: Traditionally, Gantt diagrams visualize classic activity and milestone data, but cplace is one step ahead — our Hybrid Gantt enriches project data with product and process information by meshing data from these three worlds. The solution offers a more holistic project overview that allows time-efficient and well-informed project management.
Step 4: Scaling Agile
Agile teams provide a wide range of benefits, and — of course, once companies experience these advantages in their development teams, they want to reap these benefits on the largest scale possible. That is why cplace supports one of the most wide-spread frameworks to scale agile: SAFe (this acronym stands for Scaled Agile Framework). Different components of Essential Safe, such as Program Backlogs, Agile Release Trains or PI Planning — can easily be depicted and managed in cplace.
#SpoilerAlert: However, at this point, we don’t want to take away too many insights beforehand: Our Product Manager Navid Eskandari-Azari will present you all the hot hybrid stuff at cplace Day.
Don’t miss it and register for the cplace Day now
Written by Lisa Schreiber, Marketing Specialist at collaboration Factory AG.
