Archives: August 2010

Project Management Methodologies. Which One Should I Use? (Part I)

Published on by Rosa Alnasser

Hello everybody!

For this last post in August, we want to pick up the thread of posts about the 6 key reasons for the failure in project management. In the next two posts, we are going to take a look to project management methodologies and try to answer the questions that someone may encounter when dealing with this subject.

What methProject Management Methodologiesodologies are there? What are the differences among them? Which one is the most suitable for me?

Rationale behind the project management methodologies

Let’s define a project as the set of linked activities that have a common goal which has to be achieved in a predefined time span and with a particular set of resources. There are 3 key elements in the development of these activities: people, processes and tools/technologies. And therefore, the first step to take is to organize them so that they are completely coordinated.

Project management methodologies started to be defined in a formal way by the US army during the 50s. The goal was to reduce the number of projects that became out of hand and to solve some common problems that appear in most projects:

  • The load of work that is planned is too low or too high.
  • Costs surpass the project budget.
  • The final result doesn’t have the expected quality or value.

In general, project management can be predictive or agile, and as in any other subject, there are supporters of one and the other.

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Set Your Projects Goals

Published on by The Doolphy Team


We continue the series of posts about the 6 key factors for the failure of your projects. Last post, we talked about the Spanish Football National Team and the importance of team work in a project’s success. Now we go for the first item of the list: setting the goals as the first step to make a project successful.

Why are goals important?

There are five main reasons:

  1. They are the foundation to make decisions in later stages of the project, at the same time that they allow to define what the boundaries of the project are.
  2. If they are agreed upon with the customer, then you have taken a step forward for having the customer’s expectations fulfilled.
  3. They provide to all members of the team with a clear and well defined target. That’s why it is very important to communicate the project goals to everyone in the team.
  4. They constitute the foundation for the subsequent project planning. They help to divide the work into tasks, estimate their duration and assign the tasks to team members. In addition, once the goals are ranked by priority, it is possible to decide what amount of work and effort you want to invest in each one.
  5. Having no goals means that it is impossible to monitor the development of a project or even to determine if it is successful after its completion.

How can you set good goals?

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