As both an active project manager and project management trainer, I often get asked whether the project management best practices that are applicable for large projects can be applied on smaller projects. This is a really important question and one which all project managers must face up to when managing small projects.
Focusing on project delivery
One of the arguments against using project management methodologies is that they are very process-centric resulting in vast quantities of project documentation which are simply not practical or desirable on small projects. This is a powerful argument and any method which focuses on producing documentation at the expense of delivering the real business benefits of the project will be a hindrance rather than a benefit. After all, the name of the game in project management is delivering business objectives, not producing reams of documents.
There is an ongoing and active discussion within the software development community about the best way to produce
software on projects. More recently, some software professionals have argued for more agile methods of producing software rather than the more traditional...