Different Project Management Technologies Meant for Different Industries

Every individual has a different approach in dealing with a particular problem. When you work in a team with different type of people, managing all the differences can be quite a challenge. It can be quite a nightmare for the project manager to manage dependencies in a cross functional team, where priorities differ and so do personalities.

In your entire career as a project manager, you shall never come across a client who would not make addition or alteration in their demands and needs. Under such circumstances, managing resources and allocating them for specific tasks becomes a lot more difficult. If you are not able to anticipate the risk, entire plan of the project can go through the roof.

You can adopt various methodologies to ensure that your project is easily manageable based on the project requirement. Read the below mentioned points which can help you to get some strategic ideas on which method suits which situation the best.

Waterfall Project Management

The waterfall method has a very linear approach or you can better phrase it as a top down approach. In this methodology, the project manager gets the requirements and then he sits down to make a realistic project analysis of the requirement and determines how many resources he would need to complete the project. Once the analysis is over, the designing phase begins and different members of the team contribute in this sphere with his design and input. Once the designing phase is over, the next phase is known as implementation and is followed up by testing, before the project is deployed. The entire setup is quite linear and is commonly found in many companies, mostly in software industry.

Agile Project Management

This is a more dynamic methodology, where a project is formulated and processed depending on the method of trail and errors. There is no linear path and the project manager and his team is open to accept requirements and feedback from the client or other members of the team. This system is very helpful, when the management has to work under situations which have continuously changing requirements and drastic shift in assignments. This approach is ideal for any company where the size of the project is small.

Critical Path

This is altogether different approach, which is drastically different from that of agile or waterfall project methodologies. This methodology works by a step by step approach and aims at addressing a problem at a given point of time. In a critical path approach, it is believed that each project is comprised of a certain set of core elements known as critical chain. As per this method, a great amount of emphasis is laid on the allocating resources on the core elements so that the important elements of the project can function smoothly. Reasonable resources are allocated to different resources and a considerable amount of buffer is maintained to ensure that no one of the aspect of the project suffers a backlog.

Prince 2

This is one of the best developed and process oriented methodologies which were designed by the government of United Kingdom in 1996. It is a process oriented method, which divided the project into multiple stages. Each stage has its own set of plans and processes which it follows and syncs it with the other stages independently. Many people claim that it’s not a very feasible design however; it depends on the project managers to decide how far they think this method would fulfill their needs.

Besides these four types of project management methodology there are other type of methodology like Kanban technique, Six Sigma and Prism and many more. Each of them has its own set of unique functionality, which needs to be tried and tested before they can be adapted for managing a project.