Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, Fourth Edition

Chapter 2. Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme: A Dynamic Project Management Landscape

A manager ... sets objectives,... organizes,... motivates,... communicates,... measures,... and develops people. Every manager does these things – knowingly or not. A manager may do them well or may do them wretchedly but always does them.

—Peter Drucker

Principles of Project Management

When you think of the principles of management, you usually associate them with the management of people. The management of people includes defining what the business unit will do, planning for the number and type of staff who will do it, organizing the staff, monitoring their performance of the tasks assigned them, and finally bringing a close to their efforts. Those same principles also apply to projects.

Project management is a method and a set of techniques based on the accepted principles of management used for planning, estimating, and controlling work activities to reach a desired end result on time — within budget and according to specification.

Over the years that I have consulted and offered training in Traditional Project Management (TPM), I have observed a number of project management methodologies that, on first look, seem to differ from one another. On closer examination, I actually found that a number of underlying principles are present in the more successful methodologies. From them, I fashioned a TPM life cycle that was first published by Weiss and Wysocki.^[1]

Since that publication, I continue to compare ...