Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Part II

Establishing Project Management Life Cycles and Strategies

The purpose of Part I was to define projects, project management, and the Process Groups. The five Process Groups and nine Knowledge Areas are the building blocks of every project management life cycle (PMLC). Chapters 4 through 8 presented the robust use of these building blocks. That completes the foundation for our further exploration of PMLC models.

Part II identifies five different PMLCs and discusses their characteristics, strategies for using them, when to use them, and how to adapt the tools, templates, and processes to each life cycle model.

Overview of Part II

Part II consists of four chapters.

Chapter 9: Complexity and Uncertainty in the Project Management Landscape

The project management landscape is defined based on two characteristics: goal and solution. They are either clearly defined or not clearly defined. That generates a two-by-two matrix into which all projects fit. In Chapter 2 these four categories were illustrated in Figure 2-1. These four categories are the landscape over which the five PMLC models that were defined in Chapter 2 are distributed. In Part II we will examine each of these five PMLC models and discuss their use in managing the complexity and uncertainty that is characteristic of the projects that populate the four-quadrant project landscape.

Chapter 10: Traditional Project Management

The simplest part of the landscape arises in cases where both the goal and the solution are clearly ...