Projects come in all varieties and require respectively diverse management styles. There are some that require complex oversight mechanisms and formal gateways to ensure that all aspects are subject to scrutiny, while there are others for which that level of control would be overkill. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve and the scale of the impact.
Carleton Sojourner is pragmatic with our approach towards project management. There are occasions when we have had a well-defined, static scope, and our priority has been to control cost. So we’ve run waterfall-style1 projects to constrain ourselves as much as possible so as not to incur mission-creep. We also have had experience of more exploratory ventures where we’ve not been certain of what the final product should look like, where speed of iteration has been the priority. So we’ve run agile-style2 projects to provide more freedom within predictable boundaries.
In this way, we concentrate on defining the principal constraints of your project or the minimum standards that it must achieve, and base our approach on that. If there are fine quality tolerances, we provide more oversight and reporting to ensure that the result meets the desired specifications. If cost or time are limited, we try to reduce the control overhead to create a more streamlined project that still keeps risk within an acceptable level.
We work with you to find the appropriate level of control to ensure that your projects are successful, as well as good value.
Contact us if you’d like to talk about doing things once, and never having to think about them again.
- If you’re not familiar, these are sometimes called “big design up front” projects. You analyse, design, implement, then go home. [return]
- Whereas these typify a “fail-fast” approach. You try, fail, improve. Rinse and repeat this process until you’re (or your boss is) satisfied that you can go home. [return]