An Overview of the Top 4 Project Management Techniques

“An Overview of the Top 4 Project Management Techniques” on Powerfly, December 23, 2019.

Project management can get complicated. There’s a whole host of PM certifications, tools, and terms—not to mention at least 15 different project management techniques. And while you can definitely invest lots of money and lots of time in becoming fluent in Gannt charts and getting comfortable with Microsoft Project, there’s got to be something better you can do with your time. (Learn an actual language? Register to vote?)

You really only need to be comfortable with a few different project management techniques in order to accomplish your organization’s goals.

Because at the end of the day, project management is pretty simple: understanding a goal and making sure you achieve it.

Whether that goal is getting a new product launched, approving next year’s budget, redesigning a website, publishing a book, or throwing a work holiday party that is actually enjoyable—or quite literally anything in between—there’s an approach that will best help you manage towards it.

Alan Zucker, the founder of Project Management Essentials LLC, advises teams to choose a methodology that fits within the context of what the project and the team need. “New applications and significant customer interaction are well suited for Scrum. Kanban is good for enhancements to legacy applications. Teams starting their agile transformation do well with the structure of Scrum,” he says.

Below you’ll find an overview of the top 4 project management techniques—two overarching schools of thought and two popular techniques derived from them—as selected by PM pros, and what kind of teams they’re best suited for.

You Don’t Have to Choose

If you like the visual aspect of the Kanban approach but the clearly-defined-outcome part of Waterfall technique, go right on ahead and combine them. Project management is about figuring out what works for helping your team reach its goals, and that doesn’t have to mean sticking to one approach.

“Mature teams often develop their own hybrid practices incorporating many techniques,” notes Zucker.

Have you pulled from different project management techniques to create the one PM technique to rule them all? Tell me about it in the comments!