It has been almost ten months since I outlined my last model of Project Management. The importance of having some kind of mental image about projects and Project Management may not come as a surprise. We are long due for an update on how I think everything links together.

Photography by Elvire R.

People Operating In A Group

Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor they laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a “project” is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.
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There is no Iron Triangle in Project Management. In PM we learn the holy trinity of the triple constraint, the concept that we are operating within borders, and that those borders are interdependent. Oh yeah, and “triple” or “triangle” indicates that there are three. Although the image is powerful to instruct, it is plain false. There are more than three types of constraints. Environmental, law, physical to name just a few in addition to things like time and money.

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Different project circumstances require different approaches to ensure optimum effectiveness. As mentioned over and over again on this blog, it is the people who largely determine these circumstances, and you have to tailor your project approach to the particular situation. For this you can make use of techniques and tools from different existing methods by simply mixing and matching everything together in such a way that you brew the right Project Potion for the occasion.

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