Hi, welcome to this lesson where we look at the most common project and process management methodologies in large enterprises.
What content does this lesson cover?
In the next few minutes we will talk about
- the advantages through the use of methods,
- the methods and frameworks covered in this course series,
- as well as about other methods that we will not consider in this course series – including why we do not consider them.
Now to the content of this lesson:
Why are methods used?
When it comes to learning from the successes and mistakes of others, the decision has actually matured in all large companies to fall back on proven project management methods.
One advantage is not only the head start in experience thus gained, but also the
- standardization of workflows,
- the standardization of terminology,
- the standardization of role definitions and
- unifying expectations for everyone in and around a project team,
with which project team members can
- fast,
- independent of project timing,
- independent of the department and
- can be looped into the ongoing project operation without much effort.
In addition to normal staff turnover, this makes particular sense when certain skills are only needed selectively in the project or the need for additional skills arises unexpectedly and at short notice.
What are the most common project and process management methodologies and frameworks for software development?
- Milestone Trendanalysis
- Waterfall Model
- Agile project management
- Kanban
- Scrum
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- Lean Management
- Six Sigma
Here we see an overview of the 8 most common project and process management methodologies and derived frameworks for software development in large enterprises, which we will cover in the next lessons to give us a basic overview. We will deal with all methods only very superficially during the basic training and extract the contents that are important “for us” – also in order to know later which components of our recommended action or option come from which project method.
In addition, what project and process management methods and frameworks are commonly used for software development?
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- PRINCE/2
- LeSS
- Nexus
- Scrum@Scale
I don’t want to go into Extreme Programming except for a few comments in the previously mentioned methods, because despite all the remarkable advantages, this method is only suitable for small projects. However, in sharing my project experiences with you, I will suggest the use of XP principles here and there.
I also do not want to go into PRINCE, PRINCE/2 and PRINCE/2:2009 because they are not agile methods and I can already explain the basic differences with the milestone trend analysis and the waterfall model. In addition, unlike PRINCE/2, I also use components of these 2 methods in the agile environment.
I am leaving LeSS out of this course because this agile scaling is not nearly as comprehensive and widespread as SAFe.
Nexus only describes an orchestral island for coordinating distributed agile teams and thus is kept very simple, but at least in my eyes not a real scaling for a large project.
And Scrum@Scale is very general, doesn’t provide us with nearly as clear tools and events as SAFe. On the other hand, the Scrum Master has enormous freedom here – which, however, also requires corresponding experience and great agile skills. Also due to my practical experience, I therefore prefer to stick to the proven SAFe.
If you are interested, you are free to look into these 5 methods in more detail.
Now let’s summarize what we have covered in this lesson:
- We learned why we use existing methods in large companies.
- And it is now clear to us why we will cover some common methods and frameworks in this course series – and very specifically not cover others.
In the lesson that follows, we will cover the first project management method. So, see you soon.
