Principles are timeless. Practices and Process are Fads.
A Principle a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning. A Practice is an application or use of an idea, belief, or method rather than just the Principle of such application or use. A Process is a series of steps and decisions involved in the way work is completed.
For project management domain, what are some Principles? Fundamental truths that serve as the foundation for a system of belief? Here's my version in the form of questions that when answered form the foundation for the Practices and Processes.
- What does Done look like in units of measure meaningful to the decision makers?
- What is the Plan and the Schedule for the work in that Plan to reach Done for the needed cost on the needed date to deliver the needed Value to those paying for the work?
- What are the resources - time, talent and treasure - needed to reach Done as planned?
- What impediments will be encountered along the way to Done and what work must be performed to handle these impediments?
- What are the units of measures of progress to plan for each deliverable?
With these 5 Principles, there are 5 Processes needed to implement them
Each of these processes has Practices that have been shown to be widely applicable in many domains, including Agile development
Let's start with Identifying the needed Capabilities. Capabilities are what the customer bought. They are the ability to get something done.
Once the Capabilities are identified, we need the technical and operational requirements of the solution that implements the Capabilities
With the Requirements in place - and these can be a list of Features held in the Product Roadmap and Release Plan for agile, we need to lay out how they will be built
Then we need to execute this baseline
With execution underway, managing the risks of the project becomes our focus beyond the engineering work
With all this in place - to whatever scale is appropriate for the problem at hand, we need the final pieces
There, now we've got Principles, Processes, and Practices all connected.
