In today’s ever-changing business landscape, strong project management skills are an essential component to success.
But here’s the thing:
No matter how honed your project management skills may be, an ill-fitted project management strategy can spell disaster for your team.
In this article, we’re breaking down six different project management approaches you might consider adapting for your next project, highlighting the pros, cons and suitability of each approach.
Ready? Let’s get started!
Traditional project management is an umbrella term for project management approaches that follow a linear and predictable timeline.
Traditional project management has been used throughout the entirety of human history, from the pyramids of egypt to the great wall of China. However, it wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that well-documented approaches to traditional project management were established.
Traditional project management works best for projects that:
The waterfall method serves as the most well-known and widely-implemented traditional project management approach.
The waterfall method divides a project into distinct phases, which must be completed sequentially. No phase must begin before the previous phase is complete (and no phase can be revisited after implementation).
With little room for error, the waterfall approach requires the following criteria to be successful:
Most waterfall-based projects will make use of a Gantt chart, which breaks the project into phases with a clear set of durations, expectations and criteria to be met for each phase.
PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is another linear project management approach, following in the footsteps of the waterfall approach.
Having first been developed for IT projects by the British government in 1996, it stands as a hugely popular project management approach. Although still serving as the backbone of the UK Government’s project management strategy, it’s been used by private organisations all over the world.
The PRINCE2 approach is based on seven distinct high-level processes:
Although the PRINCE2 framework is linear and process-defined, it offers greater flexibility than the waterfall approach. This makes it a great option for large-scale organisations who need a little more wiggle room in their approach to project management, whilst still managing risk effectively.
The critical path method is another linear project management approach designed to identify the most time-consuming aspects of a project (to allow for a well-estimated and punctual delivery date).
Having famously come to prominence in the 1940’s through its use in the Manhattan Project, the critical path method features six primary steps:
After determining which tasks are on the critical path (in other words, the tasks that’ll take the longest to complete), the project manager has an excellent understanding of where to allocate project resources.
The critical path approach is a great methodology for time-sensitive projects, especially when being executed at scale.
Agile project management is a catch-all term for project management styles that are more fast-paced and variable than their traditional counterparts.
Agile project management was first developed in the 1990’s for software development projects. It involves breaking down large-scale projects into short “sprints” of work, with progress being presented to stakeholders at the end of each sprint.
Agile project management works best for projects that:
Kanban is a visually-driven approach to agile project management that focuses on incremental updates to a project.
Kanban project management was first developed and implemented by Toyota in the 1940’s, who used it as the backbone of their manufacturing processes. The word kanban translates from Japanese to “card”.
Having proved a popular approach to agile project management, Kanban adheres to the following five principles:
As the name suggests, Kanban projects are planned and managed on a set of Kanban boards, which allow the workflow to be visualised, adapted and monitored.
Scrum serves as one of the most widely-implemented approaches to agile project management; it focuses on learning from experience and adapting processes to fluctuating conditions.
Scrum was first developed in the 1990’s as a feedback-driven and highly-adaptable approach to software development. It’s based around the following five-step process:
The scrum approach features daily stand up meetings, where team members discuss their progress on the project and adapt their processes to suit changing project conditions.
Given its highly-adaptable nature, scrum is most-often used to develop complicated or continuously-improving products, such as SaaS tools.
Adaptive Project Framework is a structured approach to agile project management that allows project managers to adapt and respond to ongoing change.
Having been developed in the late noughties, it’s leveraged within projects that don’t have a clear end goal in mind, adopting the principle of “learning by doing” rather than “doing by the book”.
As an increasingly prominent approach in the corporate world, it’s geared around the following five-phase process:
Given its highly-flexible and communicative nature, adaptive project framework is an excellent choice for service-based projects.
With several distinct approaches to project management, it’s crucial that you select an approach that’s well-tailored to the nature and needs of the task at hand.
Once you’ve chosen a suitable project framework, why not streamline the process with a work collaboration platform such as Verto?