“What Are Project Management Methodologies and Why Are They Important?” on business.com, June 11, 2025.
Maintain consistency across projects.
Project management skills and methodologies help teams manage scope, resources and timelines more effectively. Whether your team works on software development, marketing campaigns or operational changes, a clear methodology drives consistent, successful results, reducing risk and improving outcomes.
“The reason to implement a project management framework, approach or methodology is to be more consistent and repeatable around that project execution and hopefully increase the likelihood of project success,” said Alan Zucker, founding principal of Project Management Essentials. “When we don’t use a framework or a methodology, we end up with a chaotic approach. Rather than being able to improve our project outcomes, every project is just not that successful.”
What are the types of methodologies?
There is a wide variety of project management methodologies, each suited to different industries, teams and project goals. According to Zucker, even if a particular framework works well for one project, it may not be the best fit for another. Teams may need to adapt their approach based on how clearly defined the project is and how costly it would be to change course midstream.
“There’s different ways of thinking about which types of projects or which types of frameworks fit best for us,” Zucker said. “One of the ways is thinking about the cost of the change versus the clarity. Where the cost of change is low and the clarity of needs is low, Agile works well because, with our iterative approach, we can get feedback and use that feedback as a way of deciding what suits us. However, where the cost of change is high, clarity of needs is high — i.e., doing a construction project and blueprints, traditional [methods like Waterfall] work well.”
After executing a project using a particular methodology, Zucker recommends reviewing your results and evaluating next steps.
“It’s [about] understanding how these frameworks work … and then noting the effort to figure out what’s not working and how we improve,” he said.