Project Management Frameworks in Jira Work Management

What are project management frameworks?

A project management framework lays out the procedures, tasks, resources, and tools necessary to guide a project. It’s composed of three parts: the project life cycle, the project control cycle, and tools & templates.

The project life cycle outlines how you will set up your project. Typically, it consists of five phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure.

1. Initiation: Before planning and setting a timeline, a project needs to be defined at a high level. This involves determining the business case, goals and objectives, major deliverables, and success criteria.
2. Planning: During the planning phase, a detailed plan is developed. Team members will usually answer questions about the project's goal, key performance indicators (KPIs), scope, budget, risks involved, team members' roles, and tasks required to meet milestones.
3. Execution: This is when the team goes heads down and completes the project tasks they identified. As the team continues to work on their project to-dos, they also become engaged with the monitoring phase.
4. Monitoring: During this phase, team members evaluate the project regularly to ensure that they meet task deadlines, avoid scope creep, stay within budget, and remain committed to the goal. This usually happens at the same time as the closure phase.
5. Closure: To successfully complete the project, the team must finalize loose ends, which may include a post-mortem or retrospective to review successes and areas for improvement, presenting a final report to stakeholders, and retaining project documentation for future reference.

In the project control cycle, it’s important to actively monitor and manage the project. This involves managing and mitigating risks, tracking progress across teams and team members, and communicating project statuses with stakeholders. There are typically five stages in the project control cycle.

• Stage 1: During the initial stage of a project, a plan is drafted that will serve as a guide for all teams involved. This plan should be carefully crafted in order to ensure that everyone is on the same page and knows what their role is throughout the project.
• Stage 2: The next stage consists of keeping a close eye on the progress of the project across all team members involved. The aim of this stage is to ensure that everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
• Stage 3: Team members assess the real progress made and compare it with the planned progress.
• Stage 4: Team members should then evaluate if there have been any deviations from the initial plan and analyze their potential implications. It’s also critical to assess the impact of any changes made and ensure that they are aligned with the project objectives.
• Stage 5: During the final stage of the project, there may need to be adjustments to ensure that everyone is on the right path.

Using tools and templates can help teams establish a solid foundation for implementing project management frameworks. These templates help to reduce the workload needed to prepare a project plan and documents. By using standardized outlines, content, and examples, team members can easily improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their projects.

Types of project management frameworks

There are a range of frameworks that can be utilized for various project types, team sizes, industries, and budgets. Below are examples of the most common project management frameworks:

• Agile project management is an iterative approach to managing software development projects that focuses on continuous releases and incorporates customer feedback with every iteration.
• Scrum is an agile project management framework that assists teams in organizing and managing their work using a set of values, principles, and practices. This framework is designed to be flexible and adaptable, allowing teams to respond quickly to changes in their environment.
• Kanban is a great way to manage tasks and improve processes. It emphasizes real-time communication of capacity and full transparency of work. By representing work items visually on a board, team members can easily see the state of every piece of work at any time.
• Lean is a methodology that focuses on continuous process improvement, efficient resource management, and effective work management. The ultimate objective of this framework is to enhance productivity and add value while minimizing waste.
• Waterfall is a conventional sequential framework for planning and executing projects. Each phase ends before the next one begins, so there is no overlap between them.

Project management framework best practices

Effective communication is crucial for project success. When teams have clear and consistent channels, they can collaborate seamlessly, make better decisions, and achieve their goals more efficiently.

Having a repository for notes, documents, comments, and milestones can provide significant benefits during the review process and future projects. By using lessons from previous projects, changes can be made to the new framework to improve efficiency.

Pairing Atlassian tools such as Jira with Confluence allows teams to manage projects while collaborating on content. Jira makes it easy to plan, track, and manage your projects, while Confluence centralizes project-related documentation and resources.