This study deals with the two-stage hybrid flow shop (HFS) problem with precedence constraints. Two versions are examined, the classical HFS where idle time between the operations of the same job is allowed and the no-wait HFS where idle time is not permitted. For solving these problems an adaptive randomized list scheduling heuristic is proposed. Two global bounds are also introduced so as to conservatively estimate the distance to optimality of the proposed heuristic. The evaluation is done on a set of randomly generated instances. The heuristic solutions for the classical HFS in average are provably situated below 2% from the optimal ones, and on the other hand, in the case of the no-wait HFS the average deviation is below 5%.