Fostering Innovation

31Portfolio/Program/Project Management

What's better, Agile or Waterfall? How about Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), Rapid Application Development (RAD), PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE2), Extreme Programming (XP), or some of the other more obscure techniques? This shouldn't be an either/or question. All of these project management methodologies have value, and smart CIOs use elements from all of them to be successful. There's no sorting hat that declares you Agile or Waterfall before your project begins. Don't make project management a religion—people get projects done, and the tools they use are just that: tools. What tool do you prefer, a hammer or a screwdriver? It depends on the job (although hammers are way more fun).

It's important to carefully balance team-level autonomy with enterprise consistency. Teams should be permitted to create and follow their own processes depending on the type of work. A pure app dev team follows different methods than the team supporting SaaS software. Infrastructure teams have completely different needs than app dev teams. Grant these teams flexibility within the context of enterprise-level guardrails.

Regardless of your methodologies and specific needs, a number of concepts, tools, and approaches can help you manage your projects and your teams. Let's take a look.

Consistency Creates Speed

Standardize across your organization on terminology, forms, and meeting minutes. The exact form is less important than consistency ...