Project management principles and practices

¶ … achieving effective project management have been developed over the past decades of increased practical and academic interest in the area. Many of these methodologies actually outline very similar steps and make highly similar suggestions in regards to project management, and the vast majority are far from mutually exclusive. The following paragraphs will outline three ostensibly distinct project management methodologies, noting both their differences and their high degrees of similarity.

The Project Management Life Cycle divides the progress of project management into four primary phases: Initiation, Planning, Execution, and Closure (MPMM 2011). As the names of these phases imply, Initiation involves getting the project started with appropriate research and definitions; Planning includes making a comprehensive list of resources available and needed, developing methods for ensuring quality control throughout the project; Execution takes place when the plans are implemented; and an extensive review process creates Closure for the project that sets up the organization for the next necessary project (MPMM 2011). This rather basic project management methodology can be seen repeated or represented in many other project management methodologies.

The Cornell Methodology, for example, is almost exactly the same as the Project Management Lifecycle, with the Planning Phase broken into two different phases -- High Level Planning and Detail Level Planning (Stensland 2009). The majority of the planning that is included in the Planning phase of the Project Management Lifecycle is part of the Planning (Detailed) Phase of the Cornell Method, but all aspects of planning identified in both methods are represented equally in both methods despite this slight split (Cornell 2011; MPMM 2011). In other words, the two different approaches to project management methodology are almost identical, with exact same phases with some of the same titles, even, just with a very slightly different rearrangement of certain specific steps (Cornell 2011). The final two phases in the Cornell Method are called Execution and Control (as opposed to simply Execution) and Closeout (as opposed to Closure), but even these slight differences are essentially meaningless.