A Framework for Linking Projects and Project Management Methods

Software development processes such as the Waterfall processand Extreme Programming are Project Management Methods (PMMs) whichare well known and widely used. However, conventional ProjectManagement (PM) lacks the process concepts expressed in PMMs, andthe connection between PMMs and PM is not much explored in theliterature. We present data models for PM and PMM, in a frameworkthat can articulate the PM-to-PMM relationship, illustrating withsimple examples. Tools and visualizations created in terms of ourframework can make use of the familiarity, history and context ofproject management tools, and the prescriptiveness and reactivityof PMMs, and we believe these may assist the management ofcomplicated projects, such as IT projects. Project Mentor, aprototype Java/XML implementation of the framework semantics, cancreate and then revise a PMM-aware project, conforming to aspecified PMM. The PM-to-PMM connection is persistent in projectdata, and we describe a visualization of the footsteps of a PMM inproject data that does not rely on the state of a PMM process. Thevisualization can also be used by Project Mentor, to indicate thestate of a PMM.