There are so many people who often consider that a new project can be quite a stressful part. But often what they don’t see is the stressful part is to choose the right type of project management. The project is not just limited to the project manager. Projects can be executed by anyone on regular basis. But the project nature that every individual carries can vary.
In project management, be it portfolio management or any other time, it is important to be planned well. The dependent tasks should execute with a stipulated deadline. Besides cost, limitations and resources should be considered too.
Know what is Project Management?
Project management is all about managing the tasks that need to be finished within the timespan to reach the goals. It would satisfy the customer’s needs. To be precise it defines the output and inputs requirement that is needed for reaching a certain outcome.
But your success as the project manager entirely is dependent on how well you can optimize the project resource in the limited time frame.
Know the project management types
There are so many project types that include the reports to be filled and methodologies to be used. Besides, the level of complexity can vary from being simple to a little more complex and that is when the role of project management can come into action.
Project management can help in different ways. Besides, different types of it hold unique characters. Understand that if the right project management type is not chosen then it can mess the whole project.
1. Agile
Agile project management is quite a reconciliation type. It is best for the incremental and iterative type of project. It is a process type where the solutions and demands evolve using the collaborative efforts of the cross-functional team along with self-organization. This kind of project is created for software development and was established as the response to the limited that the waterfall method had.
This project manager has all kinds of agile manifesto values and principles being followed. To be precise, its purple is to let different methods be used to create the software by giving some measurable and clear structure.
Principles:
- Support, trust, and motivate the people involved
- Customer satisfaction with early and continuous software delivery
- Frequent delivery of working software
- Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers
- Face-to-face interactions
Values:
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
2. Scrum
Another popular project management option that you can consider is Scrum’s aim to deliver and create while sustaining complex products through accountability, collaboration, and even iterative progress.
The thing that makes scrum different as compared to other Agile project management methodologies is the way it operates with the help of events, roles, and even artifacts.
Values:
- Courage
- Openness
- Respect
- Commitment
- Focus
Events and Roles:
- There is a product expert who acts as the customer’s voice while representing the stakeholder
- There is a scrum event called sprint which is an iterative time box under which the goals are completed
- The development team is the expert’s ground that ensures the product is delivered well.
- There is another event called scrum planning in which the team of the scrum together perform at the being of each sprint and plan the upcoming sprint.
3. Kanban
Kanban is often compared with scrum and there are quite similarities in it. It is one popular agile framework that focuses on quick release with self-managed teams and collaborative experts.
The concept was created on the production line and is a visual method. It focuses on delivering high-quality results by creating a workflow process. This way the bottlenecks can be found early during the initial process of development itself.
Values:
- Limiting work in progress
- Making policies explicit
- Visualization
- Flow management
- Using feedback loops
Kanban gets efficient with visual cues that often signal different development process stages. The process includes Kanban cards and boards.
- Kanban board: markets, whiteboard, sticky notes are some examples of the Kanban board
- Kanban cards: It is all about the task or work item which is in the progress. It helps in representing the data like cycle time, status, and impending deadlines.
4. Six Sigma
This is one of the popular project management methodologies that was introduced first by the engineers at Motorola in the year 1986. This focuses on improving the overall quality by redefining the errors numbers in a process.
It also helps to identify what is not actually working and then later remove it from the whole process. It makes use of the quality management method which is statistical and the expertise of the people who are specialists in such options.
Six Sigmas are carried out in two methodologies Six Sigma Green Belts and Six Sigma Black Belts. Both these are handled by Six Sigma Master Black Belts. It works as DMAIC which helps in improving the process of the business.
It means:
- It helps in defining the problem
- Projecting the goal
- Measuring in the depth of different aspects
- Analyzing the data
- Improving the overall process
- Controlling how the whole process works.
5. Waterfall
The waterfall is a traditional project management option. It is linear and has the sequential design approach where the progress flows in the down direction just how the natural waterfall flows.
This methodology was first introduced in one of the finest articles that Winston. Royce had once written. It stresses more on the current phase of development. This means it is not possible to move to another development phase until the current one is finished.
System and software requirements:
- Analysis
- Design
- Coding
- Testing
- Operations
This methodology focuses more on the documentation importance. This means if the worker needs to leave in the mid of the development process, it should be convenient for the replacement to start from where the previous person has left using the ready documents. This option is best suitable for the large protects that have stringent deadlines and stages to be covered.
Conclusion
You may see many kinds of methodologies focusing on process management with their principles and practices. Choose the one that can enhance the overall time and resource use. The methodologies that you choose should be best used for different projects whose requirements can vary.