Types of Project Management Frameworks

March 25, 2022March 25, 2022 by Nick Jones

Are you considering a change of career? Perhaps you have accumulated years of work getting stuff down and now fancy the challenge of getting other people to get things done. Welcome to the world of project management.

But before you jump into this career, you’ll need to decide on a specialism. There is more than one project management qualification and more than one framework.

So we’ve put together this guide to outline the five most popular project management frameworks.

PRINCE2

Prince2 is a vast and formal framework for managing projects. Originating in the UK, it’s popular among large organizations, especially government departments.

The main feature of PRINCE2 is the split of any project into stages and the “gated” approach. Project stakeholders will sit and review a project before deciding whether that project can continue to the next step. That’s the gate.

PRINCE2 has a broad framework. It covers documentation, planning, change management, and the business case. Find out more about PRINCE2 courses here.

Lean

As the name suggests, lean project management is all about reducing “fat” in a project, inefficiencies that cost time, money, or both.

A lean project team makes decisions through the lens of value. Does this work add value? Does this feature add value? How can we achieve the same thing for less?

Lean is a helpful way of avoiding duplication in a large complex project involving numerous parties.

Scrum

Scrum is part of the Agile framework. The prominent feature of scrum is that work happens in small, incremental parts, each adding value, and each part of a distinct two-week work cycle known as a sprint.

Project plans and requirements don’t stay fixed. They are flexible and subject to ongoing changes.

Scrum values teamwork and communication. There is little hierarchy, and the framework encourages all team members to contribute with ideas. The Scrum Master’s role is more a leadership role than a traditional management one.

Kanban

Planning a large, complex project is challenging when you have many moving parts. Trying to keep everything spinning using a traditional Gantt chart, task lists, or reports it’s complicated.

That’s where the project management framework Kanban is helpful.

The kanban board is a way of visualizing your project. Team members add tasks to the board. The tasks shift to re-prioritize, and project managers use a color scheme to delineate ownership.

XP

XP (short for Extreme Programming) is popular with developers, so you’ll often see it used on software and website projects.

It’s a methodology for programming. The framework ensures all coding happens in line with the XP processes, and the overall effect is to drive quality improvements.