Is there any such thing as a ‘best practice’ project management?
I have a personal view but my aim in this blog is partly to pose and discuss questions of relevance and value.
It is certainly true that projects by their very nature can be very different and that drives some people to argue that trying to encourage or even “require” project teams to adopt any given practices may at best produce no benefit and at worst do the opposite – therefore they argue against the concept of best practices being appropriate in projects.
Others though, would argue that there are central principles that are fundamental to delivering projects well – often a very challenging task in itself. They might also argue that those principles are common to most if not all projects? Therefore the key question might be how can, or can these principles be translated into practices that support effective project definition and delivery?
One point of note you may wish to keep in mind before commenting – project management is a very broad topic itself and the aims and needs (and challenges) of project management can vary quite substantially from one business environment to another – therefore whenever we discuss questions such as this we need to be very mindful of this fact – in other words what may be fundamentally important in one environment may be completely irrelevant in another. Therefore it might be useful at times to qualify our comments.
Finally, please do contribute to the debate in this blog and by all means feel free to post questions. However, we must ask all to read and abide by the guidance on posting and participating – most importantly, no spam or similar.
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For more resources, see the Library topic Project Management.
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Alicia is a freelance IT Project/Program Manager with 19 years of experience deploying international complex projects, 15 of which with IBM Global Services. She is certified in three major Project Management methodologies and author of the highly acclaimed "International Project Management" course
Kevin is a career long project management practitioner who has authored many accredited and unique training courses and continues to work on real projects.
Simon Buehring is the founder of Knowledge Train, an accredited PRINCE2 training organization based in London and serving organizations around the world. He is accredited in the newly released PRINCE2 Professional.
