Principles and Processes in project management
Project management principles are general guidelines or rules that serve as the foundation for how the project is planned and executed. They provide a framework for how the project should be approached and are typically based on best practices and industry standards. Principles are typically broader in nature and are not specific to a particular project.
Some examples of principles in project management include:
- Define the project scope, objectives, and deliverables: This principle involves clearly outlining the boundaries of the project, including what is and is not included, as well as the specific goals that the project aims to achieve and the outputs or outcomes that will be produced as a result of the project.
- Identify and prioritize stakeholders: This principle involves identifying all individuals or organizations that are affected by the project or have an interest in its outcome and understanding their needs, expectations, and level of influence on the project. Stakeholders should be prioritized based on their level of influence and the impact they have on the project.
- Plan for risk management and establish contingency plans: This principle involves identifying potential risks that could impact the project and developing plans to mitigate or address those risks. Contingency plans are alternate courses of action that can be implemented if something goes wrong or if risks materialize.
- Use appropriate tools and techniques to manage project execution and control: This principle involves selecting and using the most appropriate tools and techniques to manage the execution and control of the project. These may include project management software, Gantt charts, and earned value analysis.
Processes, on the other hand, are the specific steps or actions, taken to achieve the project objectives. These may be defined in a project management methodology, such as the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Processes are typically more specific and are tailored to the needs of a particular project.
Some examples of processes in project management include:
- Developing a project schedule: This process involves outlining the specific tasks and milestones that need to be completed to achieve the project objectives and establishing a timeline for completing those tasks.
- Assembling a project team and assigning roles and responsibilities: This process involves selecting the individuals with the skills and experience necessary to complete the project successfully and defining the roles and responsibilities of each team member.
- Establishing a communication plan: This process involves outlining how the information will be shared with project stakeholders, including the types of information that will be shared, how it will be shared, and who is responsible for communicating it.
- Managing and acquiring project resources: This process involves ensuring that the necessary financial, personnel, equipment, and materials resources are acquired and allocated effectively.
- Implementing quality assurance processes: This process involves verifying that the project deliverables meet the defined quality standards, which may involve conducting inspections, testing, and reviews at various points during the project.
- Monitoring and controlling project change: This process involves establishing a process for managing and controlling changes to the project scope, schedule, or budget in order to ensure that they are properly documented, evaluated, and approved.
- Closing the project and reviewing its successes and challenges: This process involves reviewing the successes and challenges of the project in order to identify lessons learned and areas for improvement in future projects. This may involve conducting a post-project review or conducting a formal project audit.
Principles are more universal, while the processes can be, often, too many and unused (when useless) in some implementations.
To review the principles of the main PM methodologies:
The PMBook has 12 principles:
- Define the project scope, objectives, and deliverables: The project scope refers to the boundaries of the project, including what is and is not included. The project objectives are the specific goals that the project aims to achieve. Deliverables are the specific outputs or outcomes that are produced as a result of the project.
- Identify and prioritize stakeholders: Stakeholders are individuals or organizations that are affected by the project or have an interest in its outcome. It is important to identify all stakeholders and to understand their needs, expectations, and level of influence on the project. Stakeholders should be prioritized based on their level of influence and the impact they have on the project.
- Develop a project schedule and budget: The project schedule outlines the specific tasks and milestones that need to be completed in order to achieve the project objectives. The budget is the allocated amount of financial resources that will be used to complete the project.
- Assemble a project team and assign roles and responsibilities: A project team should be composed of individuals with the skills and experience necessary to complete the project successfully. It is important to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team member to ensure that there is a clear division of labor and that everyone knows what is expected of them.
- Plan for risk management and establish contingency plans: Risk management involves identifying potential risks that could impact the project and developing plans to mitigate or address those risks. Contingency plans are alternate courses of action that can be implemented if something goes wrong or if risks materialize.
- Develop and maintain communication plan: A communication plan outlines how information will be shared with project stakeholders. It should specify the types of information that will be shared, how it will be shared, and who is responsible for communicating it.
- Use appropriate tools and techniques to manage project execution and control: There are a variety of tools and techniques that can be used to manage the execution and control of a project. These may include project management software, Gantt charts, and earned value analysis.
- Monitor and control project work and performance: It is important to regularly monitor and control the progress of the project to ensure that it is on track to meet the defined objectives. This may involve tracking progress against the project schedule, monitoring the budget, and measuring project performance against pre-defined metrics.
- Manage and acquire project resources: Project resources may include financial resources, personnel, equipment, and materials. It is the responsibility of the project manager to ensure that the necessary resources are acquired and allocated effectively.
- Implement quality assurance processes: Quality assurance involves verifying that the project deliverables meet the defined quality standards. This may involve conducting inspections, testing, and reviews at various points during the project.
- Monitor and control project change: Changes to the project scope, schedule, or budget can have significant impacts on the overall success of the project. It is important to establish a process for managing and controlling changes to ensure that they are properly documented, evaluated, and approved.
- Close the project and review its successes and challenges: When the project is complete, it is important to review the successes and challenges of the project in order to identify lessons learned and areas for improvement in future projects. This may involve conducting a post-project review or conducting a formal project audit.
PRINCE2 has 7 principles:
- Continued business justification: The project must remain justified throughout its lifecycle in order to ensure that it delivers value to the organization.
- Learn from experience: The project team should continuously review and learn from past experiences in order to improve future project performance.
- Defined roles and responsibilities: The roles and responsibilities of all project stakeholders should be clearly defined in order to ensure that everyone knows what is expected of them.
- Manage by stages: The project should be divided into manageable stages, with clearly defined objectives and deliverables for each stage.
- Manage by exception: The project should be managed through the use of exception planning, which involves identifying and managing deviations from the project plan.
- Focus on products: The project should be focused on delivering specific, tangible products that meet the needs of the organization.
- Tailor to suit the project environment: The PRINCE2 methodology should be tailored to suit the specific needs and goals of the project.
The AGILE Manifesto has 12 principles:
- Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
- Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
- Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
- Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
- The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
NUPP has 6 principles:
- Prefer results and the truth to affiliations: We all have a natural tendency to belong to groups, a tendency that often goes beyond its basic form, creates strong affiliations, and causes problems. We lose a lot more than we gain because of affiliations. We can become more professional and effective experts if we don’t limit our identity and preferences to certain groups.
- Preserve and optimize energy and resources: Resources are limited. Resources available for the project are limited, as is the mental energy you have to make good decisions. You should preserve and optimize this resource for yourself and for the project, and help other team members do the same.
- Always be proactive: There’s a natural tendency in us to be reactive. It can help us preserve our energy dealing with unimportant matters, or it may give us better results when we are dealing with something in which we’re completely incompetent. Those situations are different from our projects, and here we can get better results by being proactive.
- Remember that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link: There are various domains in projects, and they all need attention; we must have a holistic perspective of the project. Paying attention to a seemingly important domain (e.g., time) is not enough, because all domains interact and they don’t work properly unless they all receive adequate attention.
- Don’t do anything without a clear purpose: You shouldn’t do anything unless it has a clear purpose. Imagine two parallel worlds where everything is the same except for the thing that you’re considering doing: How different would those worlds be? Is the difference worth the effort to do that thing? If you don’t have a clear purpose in mind and are only doing something because everyone else is doing it, or everyone says that it’s important to do it, then it may not have a real benefit in your case, and therefore you may not get anything out of it; or it may still have potential benefits in your case, but because you don’t have the purpose in mind, your way of doing it may not help realize the benefits.
- Use repeatable elements: An ad hoc approach to the project takes too much energy and resources, and always runs the risk of missing some of the necessary elements. The best way of simplifying what has to be done is to use repeatable elements, and preferably to take them in repeatable cycles.
As defined on the official NUPP website, “NUPP is a collection of nearly universal principles of projects: those we’d do well to follow in all projects, regardless of the methodologies and approaches that we use, to maximize our success. Each of the available resources and methods for running projects relies on some of these NUPs (nearly universal principles).”
However, the following points need to be borne in mind:
- It’s usually not all of them, and it would be helpful for practitioners to consider all NUPs instead of a subset.
- The underlying principles are usually not made clear enough in resources and methods, and most practitioners are so engaged in practical details that they forget about principles and do things that are not compatible with them.
NUPP is compatible with all the major methods, systems, resources, and frameworks such as PRINCE2®, PMBOK® Guide, P3.express, PM², DSDM®, XP, and Scrum. It may not be compatible with certain interpretations of those systems, though, and that’s where NUPP tries to encourage practitioners to reconsider their interpretations.
A specific case from my experience
Years ago, I was leading a Team intending to develop a new portable medical device that uses impedance cardiography technology to measure cardiac output non-invasively. The device had to pass a series of regulatory and performance tests, including achieving a 95% accuracy rate in cardiac output measurements compared to current leading devices. Moreover, we had to be ready for regulatory submission within 36 months, with a pilot production run following six months after approval.
Looking back to my PM approach at that time, I applied all of the NUPP Principles even before NUPP was formalized:
NUP1: Success is defined by the delivery of customer value. To ensure the device delivered substantial customer value, we conducted extensive consultations with cardiologists and hospital technicians to understand their needs and challenges with existing devices. The feedback led to design adjustments that enhanced device usability and data accuracy, ensuring the product effectively met the specific requirements of your target users. The validation of these features was systematically gathered through pilot testing in clinical settings, ensuring that the final product truly resonated with and provided significant value to its end users.
NUP2: Planning is indispensable. Recognizing the complexity of developing a medical device, I implemented a comprehensive planning approach that included detailed timelines, resource allocations, and milestone goals. Each phase, from concept development, prototyping, clinical trials, to regulatory submissions, was carefully planned. Regular milestone reviews were conducted to assess progress against the plan, allowing for timely adjustments. This meticulous planning ensured that the project adhered to its timelines and budgets while adapting to any new insights or changes in the regulatory landscape.
NUP3: Proactive project management is essential. Anticipating potential technological and regulatory challenges, we established a proactive risk management framework at the project’s outset. This framework included early engagement with regulatory bodies to understand compliance requirements and frequent technology reviews to ensure the design met all necessary technical specifications. By identifying and addressing these potential hurdles early, the project avoided significant delays and costly last-minute changes.
NUP4: Projects are uncertain; stuff happens. Despite careful planning, we encountered unexpected challenges, such as a key supplier retiring the product from the market. We managed this uncertainty by having already established a list of alternative suppliers and quickly pivoting to a new supplier without significant disruption to the project timeline. This agile response was underpinned by the project’s flexible framework, which allowed for rapid adaptation to such unforeseen events.
NUP5: Change is normal and should be managed. During the device development, new scientific research indicated a potential improvement in measurement accuracy through a slight alteration in sensor placement. The Team managed this change through a structured change control process, which assessed the impact of this alteration on the project scope, timeline, and budget. After careful consideration and testing, the change was implemented, significantly enhancing the product’s performance with minimal impact on the development schedule.
NUP6: The project organization should align with project needs. As the project progressed, it became evident that additional expertise in digital signal processing was required to enhance the device’s data analysis capabilities. Responding to this need, the steering committee restructured the project team to include a specialist in this area. This organizational adjustment ensured that the project benefitted from the necessary expertise at the right time, which was crucial for solving complex technical challenges and maintaining the project’s momentum towards its goals.
Despite their apparent simplicity and alignment with good sense, the Nearly Universal Principles of Projects (NUPP) are profoundly powerful tools that provide essential guidance, ensuring systematic and effective project management across a diverse range of industries and challenges, thereby enabling project managers to anticipate potential issues, strategically align resources, and adapt flexibly to changes, ultimately driving projects toward successful and timely completions.
Conclusions
- As we can see the NUPP principles are universal and transversal and are valid also in more formal and well-known methodologies such as PRINCE2®, PMBOK®, and SCRUM/AGILE.
- Regardless of the methodology and approaches we utilize, we would adhere to those principles in order to maximize the success of our projects.
- We have to keep in mind that all of the methodologies and tools for managing projects, that we currently use, are based on the whole corpus of these principles.
NUPP is open and free and published under a Creative Commons license. (https://nupp.guide/)
(sources: https://www.pmi.org/, https://www.prince2.com/, https://agilemanifesto.org/, https://nupp.guide/)
PRINCE2 is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.
PMI, PMP, and PMBOK are registered marks of The Project Management Institute, Inc.
