There’s not a perfect toolkit for any PM or project. Find the ones that work for you and make your own masterpiece.

      I’m terrible with directions. Me and any piece of IKEA furniture in a room is a setting for disaster. Anger, curses, quitting. I’ve always been a fan of doing my own thing, on my own time, my own way. Sure, that sometimes means accepting failure and going back to the directions to do something “the right way,” but that’s just a part of my process. It’s the way I have always been.

      When I was a child, I would draw for hours. For a long time, I would focus on drawing people—characters I created, people drawn from photos, and even family members. It felt like a natural talent that I was expressing on my own, and I truly enjoyed it. The hobby began to get a little more serious as I got older, and my parents enrolled me in classes. My first life drawing course was eye-opening. I walked in thinking “I got this” and left the first class feeling like I had been doing it wrong all along. The teacher presented a specific way, in steps, that you should draw a body and a face. It wasn’t the way I approached it. So I tried the new way, and the outcome was the same.

      So what did I do? I decided to use a mash-up of the techniques, and I think that helped me to be better and to hone my own craft.

      Most people think project management is just about process or methodology. Those people are wrong. Project management is about so much more: delicately handling communications, having empathy for the people involved in your projects, motivating those people when things go sideways, problem solving, scouting and assessing red flags and making sure they don’t become real issues, and above all, providing project leadership that inspires great work and a positive team environment. The methodology is just a part of the PM puzzle, and depending on your project or organization, you’ll handle it in a firm or flexible way. That’s where formal training can come in handy, because anyone can truly learn and follow a documented process. While it’s helpful to have guidelines to keep your projects on the rails, it’s even more helpful to follow a core set of principles to keep yourself in check as a project manager.

The World of Project Management Methodologies

      Before you go and start outlining your guiding project management principles, it’s smart to educate yourself on the many documented project management methodologies. Next, you will find a list of those PM methodologies with basic descriptions. You won’t believe just how many there are and how they might not even apply to you. There are plenty of resources for you to dig in, to understand these on a more complex level, but having a high-level understanding of them will help you to understand how you can form your own principles (which we’ll spell out later in this chapter).

       Traditional Methodologies

      If you’re a PM purist who needs a checklist and a place for every single project task, you’ll love these methodologies. Get excited! Load up that spreadsheet! If that’s not quite your thing and you’re looking to do something a little “out of the box,” you may want to skip this section. Go on, be brave. Either way, check out these basic methodologies that can be used to inform any process—from moving your office or home to building a car, ship, or even a spacecraft!

      • Waterfall: It’s the most widely known PM methodology, which requires one task to be completed before the next one starts (see Figure 2.1). It’s easy to plan a project this way, but as soon as change occurs, you’ll be faced with scope changes, confusion, and pushed out deadlines. Waterfall is known for the handoff—allowing resources to work in silos. It works in some places, less in others (ahem, digital).