Project Management Techniques That Will Make You a Pro

Project management techniques enable organizations to effectively plan, track, execute, and complete projects within the deadline. 

In every project, you need to give complete effort while creating your products and services and adding value to them. 

As a project involves various processes, tasks, and people, you must have the means to manage everything effortlessly. 

To handle projects, whether it’s simple or complex, you need to know various project management methodologies and where they are suitable. 

In this article, I’ll discuss different project management techniques, their principles, benefits, and tools.

Let’s go!

What Is Project Management?

Project management is a process where specific knowledge, tools, techniques, and skills are used to manage a given project and tasks and complete it within the specified time while delivering value and quality. 

In this process, you form a team with the right skill sets to achieve project goals within the available resources. The primary constraints of project management are time, scope, and budget. The secondary constraints are to optimize the necessary inputs and apply them to achieve the goal. 

The aim of project management is to complete a project on or before time, ensuring that all the objectives of the client are met. 

In order to manage projects effectively, project managers require a set of skills apart from the technical knowledge required to complete tasks and assess others. These skills include effective communication, emotional intelligence, adaptability, cross-cultural competence, time management, and conflict resolution.

Different Project Management Techniques

Agile Project Management

Agile project management is an iterative, step-by-step approach to planning and managing software development processes from beginning to end. It breaks software development projects into small development cycles called iterations or sprints. 

Principles:

• Satisfy customers with continuous and early delivery
• Welcome requirements of customers
• Deliver value and expected results at the end
• Break silos of the project and simplify tasks
• Empower and motivate teams
• Effective communication
• Maintain consistency in work pace
• Enhance agility and give flexibility to the teams
• Adjust the way you work

Benefits:

• Enhanced focus on the specific requirements of a customer
• Provides better control of projects 
• Reduced waste by optimizing resource consumption 
• Faster project turnaround times with quality
• Increased chances of project success with everything streamlined and tailored efforts
• Offers the capability to detect product defects or issues faster and clearer
• Improved overall development process for better results

Examples: 

• Customers share their issues with the camera, charging, user interface, etc., and the development teams work on those and release a new update. 
• To launch a new website, you must gather requirements, write a website brief, design and develop the website, complete testing, and adjust the changes. 

Tools:

#1. Atlassian

Get agile project management methodology for your software development program with Jira software. It supports agile methodologies, be it Kanban, scrum, or your own methods. 

From agile boards to roadmaps, reports, and integrations, you can plan, manage, and track your agile software development from a single place. 

You will get sprint planning tools, including version management, easy backlog grooming, story points, and a scrum board. You can use sprint permissions, custom issue types, workflows, and release hubs to track and manage the sprints. 

#2. Wrike

Enable continuous delivery of your springs faster with Wrike. It is an agile project management software that helps your team collaborate, communicate, and deliver work faster, all in one place. It helps improve workflow and continuously monitor deadlines so that your projects always stay on track.

With Wrike, make your project delivery simple and enable your team to easily share information and prioritize tasks. You can streamline your project, utilize all the resources efficiently, and finish the development process within the deadline.

Scrum Project Management

Scrum project management is a management technique that prioritizes incremental and iterative product delivery through collaborative decision-making and constant feedback. 

Scrum fixes costs and time to control resource requirements using collaborative ceremonies, frequent feedback cycles, prioritized product backlog, and time boxes. 

Principles: 

• Control over the process that involves inspection, adaption, and transparency
• Self-organization
• Value-based prioritization
• Collaboration
• Time-boxing
• Interactive development

Benefits:

• Allows development teams to complete delivery efficiently and quickly
• Ensures effective use of money and time
• Divide large projects into smaller, easy-to-manage sprints
• Enables developments to be tested during the review session
• Collects feedback from stakeholders and customers
• During Scrum meetings, the efforts of individuals are visible more clearly

Examples: 

• Developing new software: Teams can develop and deploy new features of a software solution rapidly. 
• Marketing: Scrum helps solve complex problems by learning through previous data and allows your team to plan accordingly. 

Tools:

#1. Smartsheet

With Smartsheet, you can manage programs, processes, and projects that scale. It offers a set of workflows, views, dashboards, and reports to adapt to your requirements. You can also capture and track your resources, plans, and schedules.

You can combine user experience with project consistency and drive project delivery, alignment, and results. Smartsheet enables you to manage creative and marketing work, people, and content and align with your priorities, purposes, and people.

#2. Miro

Supercharge your project through sprint planning, daily Scrums, and more with Miro. It helps you convert your amazing ideas into reality with its Planners, Templates, and Kanban boards. You will get a single hub for your project to reduce preparation time and create a better experience for your agile team.

Miro’s private mode allows you to improve your agile workflows. You can visualize dependencies and projects in a single place and estimate the time needed for each task. Additionally, you can enhance collaboration with its powerful AI. 

Lean Project Management

Lean project management is the process of managing lean concepts, such as lean manufacturing, lean thinking, and lean construction. 

The primary goal is to maximize value and minimize waste. It helps organize projects to meet market requirements and conditions by changing organizational and functional layouts. 

Principles: 

• Identify value: The first principle is to identify the product value. Your stakeholder, client, or customer defines value. It can be price point, timeline, or quality. 
• Map value stream: It involves diagramming your ideal and current workflow from the beginning to the end of your project. While comparing them, you can detect waste to maximize efficiency.
• Create flow: After you compare, you need to rework your project plan by removing waste. For this, you can break down each stage of the product development process and reconfigure them as needed. 
• Establish pull: A pull system helps your business keep workflow moving efficiently. It pulls work from previous processes to meet the exact demands of your customers. 
• Continuous improvement: Starving for perfection through continuous improvements is Lean project management’s fifth principle. According to your client or customer demands, you will need to analyze the product value and workflow to reduce waste. 

Benefits:

• Improved efficiency and productivity
• Reduced lead times
• Lower storage and inventory costs
• Decreased overall costs
• Greater product or service quality
• Higher customer satisfaction

Example:

• Lean project management for manufacturing: Lean is especially used in the manufacturing industry for eliminating waste (Muda). It also involves waste created by overburden (Muri) and unevenness in workloads (Mura). 

Waterfall Project Management

Waterfall project management is a methodology that follows a structure and sequential approach for the completion of a project. It provides the most straightforward way to manage your entire project. 

This technique aims to consider customer and stakeholder needs during the planning phase, arrange them into sequential and linear project plans, and stick to the same plan. 

Principles:

• Sequential structure: The waterfall model separates your operations into various phases. You can move to the next stage once you complete the current one. This means you will never find any space for revisiting a phase or changing its course after completion. 
• Minimal customer involvement: It involves minimal interaction with customers since all operations start only after knowing the customers’ objectives and requirements.
• Powerful documentation: This involves detailed documentation of all the objectives, development process, and outcomes. You will find everything in this documentation, from the timeline to the route to solve problems. 

Benefits: 

• Presents a clear structure with its sequential modeling of different phases
• Transfers information in a smooth way
• It enables you to manage and determine your goals effectively
• Follows a linear approach to avoid deviation from the original one

Examples:

This type of project management is often used in production or construction projects, such as appliances, cars, electronics, buildings, offices, etc.

Tools:

#1. ProjectManager

Set phases and task dependencies easily with ProjectManager’s waterfall project management software. It offers drag-and-drop functionality that helps adjust your project schedules. 

You can easily create waterfall plans, make a timeline, and set milestones. It provides progress reports, team collaboration, waterfall planning, a project dashboard, multiple views, and more.

#2. Asana

Get a flexible and easy-to-use waterfall management platform to deliver quality projects together and faster. Asana allows you to manage complex work with its List View, Timeline, and Boards. You can connect your business tools to collaborate, communicate, and coordinate work from one place. 

Kanban Project Management

Kanban project management is used to improve workflows and team focus and reduce inefficiency and waste. 

This is not based on ceremonies, roles, and sprints. Instead, it is flexible and easily adapts to the team structures and existing roles by categorizing tasks on a Kanban board. 

Principles:

• You can visualize your workflow on a Kanban board to represent work in your inventory. 
• You can set a limit on work progress that can be done at one time in a column. 
• You can focus on flow to keep a lookout for interruptions and improve accordingly. 
• You can monitor the Kanban system and make continuous improvements on your ongoing projects. 

Benefits:

• Offers flexibility
• Continuous delivery
• Improved efficiency and productivity 
• Less time wastage 

Examples:

Kanban project management system is used by healthcare, IT and software development, manufacturing, and marketing industries. 

Tools:

#1. ClickUp

Manage your projects and tasks with ClickUp’s flexible views. It offers drag-and-drop tasks, filters, sorting, and more with a customizable Kanban system. 

Get a complete overview of your team project and see several workflows in a single view. You can arrange your columns easily to manage your projects the way you want by status, priorities, assignees, and more. 

#2. nTask

Manage your workflows with real-time communication and transparency of projects, and supercharge them with Kanban Boards. nTask defines custom statuses in its boards to reflect the task completion stage. You can direct your emails and eliminate the creation of tasks manually on its board. 

Six Sigma Project Management

Six Sigma is a project management technique used to find out the root cause of complex problems. It follows a structured approach and uses an iterative process to understand the quality of ongoing projects, determine the cause of an issue, and get solutions. 

Principles: 

• Focuses on customers
• Assess the steps of a process and find the problem
• Eliminate outliers and defects
• Involves stakeholders
• Flexible with a responsive system

Benefits:

• It makes you understand the changing objectives and requirements of customers
• Improved quality and delivery
• Reduced waste
• Development of powerful processes and products
• Enhanced competitive positions in the market

Examples:

Six Sigma Project Management Technique is used in various industries, including supply chain management services, aviation, finance, engineering, healthcare, hospitality, and more.

Critical Path Method

Critical Path Method is a step-by-step algorithm that defines critical and non-critical processes or tasks with a goal to prevent scheduling problems. It is suitable for projects that consist of multiple activities interacting in a complex manner. 

Principles:

• Characterization of projects
• Core components needed to complete the project
• Project requirements

Benefits:

• Effective scheduling
• Cost control
• Improved project management
• Distribution of team for various tasks made easier

Examples:

Critical Path Method manages various projects, including software development, event planning, manufacturing, and construction.

Tools:

#1. PMCalculators

PMCalculators offer premium tools to draw activity diagrams on project nodes and calculate the critical path for a maximum of 50 activities. Calculate the early start and finish times, slack, and late start and finish times using this method.

Using the PERT method, obtain the standard variance, deviation, and estimated time for every activity. Calculate the probability of completing a project on a given schedule, evaluate its crashing cost, and reduce its duration. 

#2. AtoZmath

AtoZmath offers a critical path method and PERT calculator so that you can solve complex problems step-by-step. It allows you to get instant solutions to your product problems.

PRINCE2

PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE2) is a project management methodology used across different countries that focuses on control and organization throughout the project. This is a process-based and linear framework focusing on initiatives that are in motion. 

Principles: 

• It requires you to have clear needs, roles and responsibilities, realistic benefits, and detailed cost management.
• Continuous learning 
• Project boards establish common requirements 
• Teams must maintain a quality register
• The method can accommodate a project’s specific needs

Benefits:

• Offers flexibility
• Easy methodology for beginners
• It’s suitable for any project type

Examples:

PRINCE2 can be used in public sectors, the oil and gas industry, construction, IT, banking, engineering, operations management, marketing, and more.

Tools:

#1. Asana

Implement PRINCE2 methodology with Asana and simplify your workflow management. You can choose from the workflow templates library or create custom workflows to streamline processes.

It helps you direct the project, start a project, manage stage boundaries, control a stage, manage product delivery, and close a project. 

#2. PMBOK

Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is a collection of best practices, processes, guidelines, and terminologies around project management. It can evolve over time and is an essential resource for your organization. 

In addition, PMBOK can help you standardize practices in various departments, prevent project failures, and tailor processes to meet specific needs. 

Earned Value Management

Earned value management is a method that objectively measures progress and performance. It can combine the measurements of scope, costs, and time and is able to give accurate forecasts of performance problems, enabling you to manage projects efficiently. 

Principles:

• Requires you to finalize the scope of work beforehand, breaking it into small pieces, and assigning them to team members
• Needs someone to control schedule, cost, and technical objectives
• Performance measurement must include work scope, cost, objectives, recorded and actual costs, and accomplishments 
• Analyzing plan variations, preparing an estimate, and forecasting impacts
• Using earned value data in the management processes

Benefits: 

• Offers real-time visibility of earned value data
• Enables realistic project planning
• Accurate schedule and budget measurement
• Eliminates risks
• Improves motivation and accountability

Examples:

IT, defense, government agencies, the commercial sector, etc., use this technique. 

Tools:

#1. ProjectManager

Plan projects, manage resources, and build workflows with ProjectManager’s robust features. You can bring accuracy, insights, and agility to your project portfolios. With its mobile application, you can update tasks from the shop floor or worksite immediately. 

Project managers can easily collaborate on projects without compromising critical information using project management software’s custom roles, approval workflows, user permissions, technical security, project restrictions, etc. 

Conclusion

As a project manager, you need to know different project management techniques and its benefits. Every technique I’ve discussed above is for project management but with a different principle. 

You can also use suitable project management tools to plan, organize, execute, and track ongoing projects through various features and capabilities.

Next, check out Scrumban’s methodology for project managers.