Practical Project Management

Let’s start with the premise that you do need a methodology, a way to get from “what we want to do” to “we accomplished what we wanted to do.”

The choice of methodology is growing; we have PMI, and Prince2, as underlying approaches. We have waterfall, agile, and now Project Management 2.0. Glen Alleman has a great discussion on PM 2.0 on his Herding Cats blog.

Really methodology is the process of moving from start to finish in a project. The right methodology helps you to communicate where you are in your project, what is coming, what needs to be dealt with, and what is going really well. Using a consistent methodology within your organization allows you to measure your success against other projects, and apply improvement processes to become more efficient at project delivery.

I think it does matter what methodology you use, based on the project you are undertaking. I’m not sure that statement will be controversial.

What I see happening is that methodologies are chosen by bright shininess, not by appropriateness.

So, I think it does matter what methodology you use, even if it’s your own methodology. If you’ve been a PM for any time, you’ll have figured out your style and that adds the flavour to the methodology. If you’ve been one for a long time, you will have been doing agile before the name was applied to the methodology. After all, an agile project can’t be done through waterfall without lots of iterations of the planning process.

Someone out there is using the next best shiny methodology, they’ve created it to fill a gap in a project that is left by the current methodologies. We’ll all be discussing the new shiny one next year, or the year after, forever – well maybe not forever.

The key to success is that you choose – or make up – the methodology that works for your project.

In my experience, there are two kinds of project.

Type A = First we do A, then we do B, then we do C = commonly known as waterfall

Type B = first we figure out A, then we do A, then we figure out B and then we do B, then we figure out C and then we do C = commonly known as agile.

New and improved methodologies must help to make type A and B more efficient, more effective and more easily understood.

Let me know what you think.

Tags: communication, Innovation, Planning, PMP, professional

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Professionalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.