Different Approaches for Project Management

Project management works as an ignition for the chain reaction of the whole development cycle. It also helps to layout each and every step of the development cycle and defines the action plan to be followed during the risk-conditions. Not only this, project management methodologies help track down the success rate for a project and improve the understandability of the workforce.

Conventionally, any project management approach revolves around the 5 basic processes involved in project management, named as:

• Initiation: This step determines the nature and scope of the project. All the basic elements of the project like requirements analysis and feasibility, review of current operations, goals are determined. It is the most crucial stage and if performed incorrectly, results in the failure of the whole project.
• Planning & design: This stage basically helps to plan time, cost, and resource during the course of the development. Risk planning is also performed to effectively tackle uncertainties.
• Executing consists of the activities used in the process to work in sync with the project plan so as to meet the deadlines of different milestones.
• Monitoring & control: These processes verify and validate the activities and their sequence and timelines with the project plan. The quality of activities is also considered here.
• Closing includes the formal acceptance of the product so developed. Administrative and other formal activities are performed to release the product to the end-user or client after thorough testing.

Different project management approaches are designed for easily carrying out the different process in a planned way for accomplishing all the requirements. Each approach have key feature of its own which keeps the activities in sync with the project plan. Some project management approaches are:

• The traditional approach: This approach is the most basic approach in project management. It is quite similar to the waterfall model in software development services. All the five processes are executed in sequence, with the extension of recursive-ness of a few processes to support the development cycle.
• PRINCE2: It is a structured approach for project management introduced in 1996. It posses the key feature of automatic control of any deviation observed against the project plan. Each specified process in this approach, has its key input and output with the associated activities to be performed and specified goals of those activities. Processes are divided into manageable stages and close monitoring of each stage results in an organized and controlled rolling out of activities.
• Lean Project-management: This approach to project management is based on the concept of lean-manufacturing. Lean-manufacturing is centered on the elimination of wastage in order to minimize the cost of production and hence improving the quality of the product.
• Event Chain methodology: It has a key feature of identifying and managing events and event chains which affects the schedule of the projects. This approach helps in handling the negative impact & allows the modeling of uncertainties in project schedule.

However, it is not necessary that all the project management methodologies work well. In the dynamic industry environment, the basic aim of any project management strategy is to accomplish a task. However, it should be within the allocated budget and time while maintaining the quality of the final product.