Project methodology: 7 steps to managing a project

By Nathalie Pouillard & Coralie Petit

Published: 12 November 2024

Project management methodology structures the different phases of your projects. It promotes optimum organisation, and is particularly necessary for large numbers of complex projects.

It reassures all the stakeholders, including you as project manager, and sets a framework that undeniably simplifies the launch of your projects and their success.

Want to find out more about this process? We've got methods for optimising your productivity and project planning. 👇

See all software Project Management

The importance of project methodology

A single method?

In project management, there is not just ONE project management methodology, but several possible combinations of methods and management tools, which can be adapted according to :

the type of project (web, technical, association, etc.),
its characteristics
its constraints
the context
the team's experience
the corporate culture.

What are the challenges of a project methodology?

Project methodology enables you to :

Find the best way to plan and execute your projects,
improve decision-making thanks to clearly defined roles,
Save time and money by re-using a management method for other projects,
manage the scope of the project,
avoid forgetting project stages such as risk management,
control project expenditure,
quickly identify problem projects ,
mobilise a high-performance, autonomous team .

In addition to the methods, the project must go through various phases that will enable its feasibility to be studied and guarantee that the objectives will be achieved.

How to develop a project methodology: 7 key stages

Stage 1: establishing a complete diagnosis, an audit

👉 This is about getting off to a good start:

Meet all the stakeholders in the offices or in the field (the customer or project owner, the engineers on the implementation team, the company's employees, the end users, the scrum master).
Gather and analyse the needs, requirements and resources available for implementing the project.
Study the local context (political, economic, etc.).
Determine which actions are relevant and feasible, and the level of complexity of the project.
What management methodology was used in previous projects? How does the team involved work, and what skills does it have?

Stage 2: identifying project governance

👉 This is the stage at which the roles and responsibilities of each member of the cross-functional project team within the company, and in particular the steering committee, are clearly identified and assigned.

A good team that knows where it's going increases the chances of the project's success.

Stage 3: defining objectives, drawing up specifications

👉 The objectives of a project are determined by the company's managers and the project team.

They are broken down into intermediate objectives ( milestones), each with its own purpose and deadline.

Example: the aim of the project is to launch a product, and one of the milestones could be the opening of a temporary boutique to give people a preview of the product.

Deliverables are both intermediate outputs (working documents, budgets, etc.) and project goals.

They represent tangible results whose success can be measured:

a model
a product
a service
a new organisation.

The specifications are the first deliverable, as they compile the analysis work (diagnosis, definition of the project team, objectives, etc.) into a concrete document.

Stage 4: project scheduling

👉 This is when the project is broken down into stages, a set of tasks, each of which corresponds to milestones, themselves associated with deliverables.

Agile methods

Agile methods are very popular, especially for innovative and IT projects, particularly the Adaptative Project Framework method, because they favour segmentation. Each stage is a project in its own right, with its own objectives. Adaptations and corrections can be made at any time. The customer or project owner is also involved, working in collaboration with the entire project team.

Another scheduling method involves breaking the project down into a multitude of tasks and sub-tasks, to increase the chances of completion and prioritise the work.

The Work Breakdown Structure method

🔎 The Work Breakdown Structure( WBS) method makes it possible to :

prioritise deliverables in order of importance,
divide the deliverables into sub-assemblies,
define the tasks required to complete each deliverable and sub-deliverable,
if necessary, divide up these tasks.

The PERT method

🔎 Once the project has been broken down into tasks, the PERT method (or PERT diagram) diagrams the interconnection of the tasks, which may be successive, simultaneous or convergent.
Each task has an estimated duration to determine the critical path.

Stage 5: planning, resource management and risk management

👉 The project team can now sequence the tasks in a schedule, either chronologically or evolving in parallel, taking into account a safety margin.

The Gantt chart

🔎 The Gantt chart is often used as a complement to the PERT chart because it is based on a timetable rather than on the sequence of tasks. It graphically presents the progress of the project.

The critical path of a project...

Let's go back to the critical path. This is the sequence of tasks in a project throughout its lifecycle.

Any delay to a task has a direct impact on the following tasks and on the project deadline, and safety margins are defined for each task.Once positioned on the critical path, tasks have a zero margin.

☝️ The Critical Path Method (CPM) identifies the most critical path for achieving the objective. It is a complementary project management method to PERT, which calculates the shortest path.

... and its limitations

The limitation of the critical path, like that of the PERT diagram, is the absence of the "resources" dimension, which is essential for a realistic projection.
Resources are :

human
budgetary
material
technological.

The critical chain method

🔎 For a better understanding of the constraints and duration of the project, we recommend using the Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) method.

Among other things, it makes it possible to :

identify risk factors (hidden or unforeseen costs, supply delays, material failures, technological developments, lack of communication and coordination),
prevent priority conflicts between different resources,
limit multitasking and wasted time,
free the project manager from supervising details.

🎬 This video retraces all the concepts necessary for a good understanding of the subject:

Stage 6: Project implementation and monitoring

👉 The project steering committee looks for and deploys solutions to achieve specific objectives. The management tool mentioned just above is part of this.

Now that the project is underway, it needs to be monitored in order to :

anticipate potential delays or resource shortfalls,
monitor :
- progress of activities
- adherence to the schedule
- expenditure,
- results in relation to the initial project plan,
make adjustments if necessary.

Dashboards, with key performance indicators, or Key Performance Indicator, offer a visualisation of decisive elements (workforce, budget, etc.) and have the advantage of encouraging communication between the project manager and stakeholders.

🔎 For monitoring, the Kanban board is one possible visual method: it is a representation of the workflow, using a system of post-it notes on a board. Each task goes from "scheduled" status, to "in progress" and then "completed".

Stage 7: Closure and assessment of results

👉 This is the time to take stock, to learn lessons about what worked, what went wrong and why.
A dedicated meeting can be organised with the stakeholders, the project team, the end users, etc., and the remarks are recorded in a summary report.

Other examples of project management methods

🔎 Scrum: this is the most widely used Agile method, particularly for creative projects. It provides a framework: roles, an iterative rhythm, precise and time-limited meetings, short sprint planning, a progress chart, etc. The people involved in the project adjust it according to their experience and the context.
🔎 PMBoK: the Project Management Body of Knowledge is a guide produced by the PMI (Project Management Institute) to structure the essential project management knowledge.
🔎 Prince2: the PRojects IN Controlled Environments method focuses on 3 points: project organisation, management and control. It is a generic method used for large-scale projects.
🔎 Waterfall method: this traditional method, originally used in industries such as the automotive and construction sectors, involves taking things one step at a time, using a logical, sequential approach.

Here are a few solutions worth checking out

CESAR.TEAM

CESAR.TEAM is designed for large companies, enabling end-to-end project lifecycle managementwith detailed analysis of budgets, costs and risks. Produce a forecast operating account (P&L) and smooth financial production monitoring. The structured project breakdown methodology complies with the requirements of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and is compatible with SCRUM, Prince2, Phase-Gate and Pmbok methods .

Manage all the components of a project, such as :

phases
work packages
deliverables
tasks
project requests
programmes,
portfolios with intuitive screens,
large volumes.

monday.com is project management software that is particularly well suited to group project work . Fun and collaborative, the platform has a number of features to make your tasks easier and help you achieve your goals quickly, including :

managing several projects from a single location,
automating project approvals and tasks,
improved decision-making with a shared platform where your teams can update their progress,
organising the scope of the project and preventing potential delays thanks to a customised dashboard,
use templates to create reproducible project structures.

Sciforma

Sciforma combines project management and PPM in a single tool. Its rich functionality is matched only by its ease of deployment. The software adapts to the most popular project management methods:

Agile,
Critical Chain,
Prince 2,
Phase-gate,
PMBok, etc.

It can also be customised using the plugins available.

In particular, Sciforma optimises :

Gantt chart creation and monitoring,
resource management and allocation,
planning problems, which are now a thing of the past,
project reports, available at the click of a button,
communication between stakeholders,
risk management and resolution.

SuiteProG

The strength of SuiteProG's publisher, IQar, is that it is also a PPM consultant and has designed the Project Portfolio Management System (SMPP ), a unique reference framework for project governance certified by Bureau Véritas.
The software has therefore been developed and improved by expert project teams, to ensure an optimum user experience, hence the pedagogical approach:

context-sensitive help,
video tutorials,
project methodology, practical fact sheets
notification support.

You don't need to be an expert yourself - the software package is intuitive and covers :

project management, from idea to close,
framing and prioritising requests (thanks to scoring),
planning an unlimited number of projects,
monitoring (personalised dashboards),
visualisation of the schedule, compared with the initial forecasts.

z0 Gravity

z0 Gravity's strong point is its visual mode, which provides a 360-degree workspace. This innovative software package provides companies with agile methods and tools to meet their innovation challenges and transformation projects.
The augmented visualisation, both global and detailed, gives the project manager the means to navigate through all the components of the project thanks to a common thread.

It allows you to :

Simultaneously manage several project portfolios,
Generate reports that can be customised to suit your position or sector of activity,
create links between departments, business lines and divisions.