I’ve been in a few projects. The methodologies used to manage them have been varied. The success rates more so.
I’m reading
Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2™ 2009 Edition
£88.13 inc. VAT
and I’m thinking about Prince2 projects, the Agile XP type project and the Scrum based one that I’ve operated within in the last few years.
The Agile XP one was blazingly successful if not a little risky. It was chaotic and fool hardy but delivered.
The Scrum one taught me much about the values of Scrum and how they can be succesfuly undermined. Scrum is about communication, not whipping the drones each morning.
Of the Prince projects, the bad ones were where the PMs didn’t understand the project end goals because they belonged in another industry – not in software development. Project management is a portable skill, but rolling out ready cooked software is NOT the same as creating new software. The good project outcomes – well they were on stable market products and so were the practitioners (stable and skilled that is) :-)
Any methodology is only as good as the staff using it, their knowledge of the domain and their ability to use the correct aspects of the technique.
No silver bullets here.
