Project management

1. Defining the work

   What is being done, what is not, and what would count as finished. The agreement that everything downstream depends on and that is routinely assumed rather than made.

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2. Sequence

   What has to happen before what, what the project depends on that it does not control, and which chain actually determines the date.

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3. Running it

   How progress is established, how change is handled, and how a problem becomes visible before the deadline rather than at it.

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4. Closing

   Ending the project deliberately: confirming it is done, releasing the people, and recording what actually happened so the next estimate is better.

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1. The critical path method

   James E. Kelley & Morgan R. Walker · 1959

   Also known as CPM, Critical path

   The longest chain of dependent tasks sets the finish date, and only that chain does.

   Everything else has slack. The practical consequences are unintuitive and reliably ignored: adding people to a task off the critical path changes nothing, a delay on the path is a delay to the project, and the path itself moves as work progresses, so it has to be recalculated rather than drawn once.

   Reach for it when

   On any project where tasks genuinely depend on one another and a date has been promised.

   Where it stops

   It assumes known tasks and known durations. Estimates carry padding at every step, and the method has nothing to say about work whose shape is discovered while doing it.

   James E. Kelley & Morgan R. Walker, “Critical-Path Planning and Scheduling”, Eastern Joint Computer Conference, 1959.

2. Stage-gate

   Robert G. Cooper · 1986

   Work proceeds in stages separated by decision points where a project can be stopped.

   Each gate asks the same three questions — is it still worth doing, are we doing it well, and what would justify continuing — with criteria agreed before the answer is known. The gate that matters is the one where a project is killed, and its absence is why organisations carry projects nobody believes in for years.

   Reach for it when

   Where several initiatives compete for the same money and none of them ever ends.

   Where it stops

   Applied rigidly it is slow and rewards documentation over evidence. Cooper’s own later work loosens the gates considerably for exactly that reason.

   Robert G. Cooper, Winning at New Products, Addison-Wesley, 1986.

3. Scrum

   Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland · 1995

   Fixed short cycles producing something usable, with the plan reconsidered at the end of each one.

   A deliberately small set of roles, events and artefacts built on the assumption that requirements will be wrong and are best corrected by evidence rather than by analysis. Its most valuable and least practised element is the retrospective, which is the only part that changes how the team works rather than what it produces.

   Reach for it when

   Where what should be built is genuinely uncertain and can be delivered in pieces.

   Where it stops

   It is a container, not a method — it says nothing about how to build anything well. Adopted as ceremonies without the authority to change direction, it becomes weekly status reporting with new vocabulary.

   Ken Schwaber, “SCRUM Development Process”, OOPSLA ’95; Schwaber & Sutherland, The Scrum Guide, from 2010.

4. The RACI matrix

   Established project management practice · 1970s

   Also known as Responsible, accountable, consulted, informed

   For each task, name who does it, who answers for it, who must be asked and who must be told.

   The distinction that earns its keep is between responsible and accountable: several people can do the work, but exactly one answers for whether it happened. Most of the value appears while filling it in, when it turns out two people believed they were accountable for the same thing, or nobody was.

   Reach for it when

   On any piece of work involving more than one team, and immediately after something fell between two of them.

   Where it stops

   It allocates existing work; it does not question whether the work is right. Kept as a document rather than an agreement it becomes something to point at after the fact.

   Long-standing practice in project management; documented in the PMBOK Guide, Project Management Institute.

5. The Gantt chart

   Henry L. Gantt · 1910s

   Every task drawn as a bar against a calendar, so that duration, overlap and sequence can be seen at once.

   More than a century old and still the default way work is shown over time. What it does well is expose two things that are invisible in a task list: how much is happening at the same moment, and which things cannot start until something else finishes. Adding the dependencies is what turns it from a picture into a plan.

   Reach for it when

   When a schedule exists only as a list of dates and nobody can see where the load falls.

   Where it stops

   It shows the plan, not the risk in it, and it invites false precision — a bar drawn to the day looks like a commitment even when the estimate behind it was a guess. For work that is discovered as it goes, it ages within a week.

   Developed by Henry L. Gantt around 1910–1915; a similar chart was published by Karol Adamiecki in 1896.

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

An organisation that never compares its estimates with its outcomes is making the same errors indefinitely.