Are Standardized Methodologies Headed for the Exit?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   Organizational Project Management  

I still know executives who believe there is one way of working when it comes to projects. It has to be a standard, plan-driven, waterfall-like project methodology or nothing.

But those executives are in the minority. There are more who now accept that there are actually two ways of working when it comes to delivering projects: a formal waterfall-based methodology, and a less formal—but still well defined—agile methodology.

And increasingly, the executives I’m working with are accepting that there are really three ways of working when it comes to delivering projects, adding hybrid to the mix where that is seen as the ability to pick and choose from a catalogue of processes that fit within either a waterfall framework or an agile framework.

Well, all of those executives are wrong…or at least they soon will be.

There is soon going to be an unlimited number of ways of working to deliver projects, and executives are going to have no control over any of them. That’s actually a very good thing, but it is undoubtedly going to be difficult for many executives to accept given how long they have relied on standardized approaches to not only help provide governance, but also to provide the perception that accurate reporting can happen.

Project diversity, singular purpose
The change is coming about because projects are becoming ever more …

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