Lean sounds a bit abstract on its own, but combine it with Kanban project management and it’s easy to build your own Lean project management system. Conceived by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno and implemented in 1953, Kanban is set up much like a factory floor, where a part might start out as a piece of…
Category: Project Management Methodology
Six Sigma Project Management
Motorola wasn’t about to let the auto industry take all the credit for project management innovation, so decades after Toyota’s introduction of Kanban, the mobile phone company’s engineer Bill Smith created Six Sigma in 1986. It’s a more structured version of Lean than Kanban, one that sets specific stages and adds in more planning to…
Traditional Project Management
Perhaps the most obvious way to break up your projects into a workflow, traditional project management is often referred to as “waterfall” project management because it handles one thing after another in a linear order. Think of it like your favorite mobile game, such as Candy Crush: you can’t unlock the next level until you’ve…
PRINCE2
What is PRINCE2? PRINCE2 (an acronym for PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a de facto process-based method for effective project management. Used extensively by the UK Government, PRINCE2 is also widely recognised and used in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally. The PRINCE2 method is in the public domain and offers non-proprietorial…
Scrum Project Management Intro
Arguably the most structured framework of the Agile methods, Scrum was first introduced in the 1986 as a way for “teams to work as a unit to reach a common goal,” according to its inventors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. Scrum takes parts of Traditional and Agile project management ideas and combines them for a…
Lean Project Management Intro
Agile project management dictates that you break your work up into smaller, shippable portions, but it doesn’t say much about how to manage each of those portions of your project. Scrum tries to fix that with managers and meetings; Lean, on the other hand, adds workflow processes to Agile so you can ensure every part…