The Project Management Spectrum
Recently in a comment on LinkedIn regarding the Waterfall/Agile/Hybrid debate, Adrian Dooley (Praxis Framework) explained how projects live on a continuum, with Cost of Rework and Uncertainty being the two primary defining factors.
I loved his explanation and wanted to add my own thoughts. To help illustrate these, I put together a quick graphic to illustrate the idea (above).
Projects live within this spectrum of Certainty/Uncertainty and Low/High Cost of Rework.
So your project lives *somewhere* within this box.
But that’s about as defined as you’re going to get – it’s in there *somewhere*.
But where depends on the project, and it depends on your experience. Has this type of project/work been done before? Have *you* done this type of project/work before? The answers to these questions help determine where in the box you are.
But notice that there are no demarcations, segments, or categories that say “If here use X”.
Because it doesn’t work that way. Nothing is ever so ‘cut-and dried’ that we can say ‘once you’ve crossed this line use X’.
It’s a matter of degrees and the answers to the previous questions.
The closer you are to the lower left the more you need a more structured approach. The closer to the top right you get, the more you’ll need to be ‘agile’ in your approach.
But it’s even a bit more complicated than that, as your ‘project’ will rarely exist as a single point in the box, but rather, ‘parts’ of your project will sit in different places all over the box. Some components will have more certainty, and others less. Some components will have a low cost of rework, and others a higher one.
It’s never a question of this *or* that approach. It’s always *more of this*, *less of that*.
And just as all projects live in the box, all tools, methods, frameworks, etc. live in the box as well, as the primary purpose of all of them is to help mitigate the Uncertainty, and reduce the ‘Cost of Rework’.
This is called ‘Project Management’.
(not Waterfall, Agile, or Hybrid)