Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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Have Methods, Will Travel
Elizabeth is a freelance writer and project manager living and working in London. She runs The Otobos Group, a project communications consultancy specializing in project management.
In the global economy, it should be no surprise that the U.K.-based PRINCE2 methodology is making inroads beyond Europe, while the PMBOK Guide continues to expand its reach internationally. A growing number of organizations, it would seem, are adopting project management best practices based on more than just where they originated. Here’s an overview.
Project management has been evolving since Henry Gantt first put horizontal lines on a chart to mark the duration of tasks. There have been a fair amount of improvements since then (not least adding dependency lines on Henry’s charts) and groups of techniques have been lumped together to give us ‘methodologies’ — what we should be doing if we want to do projects well. And even today, new versions are being developed to keep us on the cutting edge of project management best practices.
In 1983 the Project Management Institute decided that it had been around long enough to have a stab at pulling together all the knowledge its members had accumulated about how to run projects. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) was born. PRojects IN Controlled Environments followed six years later, as an output from the Office of Government Commerce, a section of the United Kingdom government’s Treasury. It started off as a way to manage IT projects, but the authors soon realized …
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"Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking." - Steve Allen |