How Formal Project Management Thinking leads to Design Projects

Some project management material seems to indicate that all the basic project management processes must be used in every project.

But in fact one of the key roles of the project manager is the tailoring of the available best practices so that the most efficent and effective processes are used. In addition some of those processes will most likely be used itteratively.

Agile methodologies are the extream version of this tailoring.

The PMI view is that what we normally call phases in software methodologies such as Scope, Design, Construction and Deployment can in large projects sometimes be subdivided into individual projects.

This is a bit of culture clash from the SW methodology mindset where we consider the all the phases as one project. After all would it really make sense to think of the stakeholders of the Design phase as different from the Construction phase?

Where actually this does make sense is in high risk SW projects common in New Product Development (NPD). In these cases creation of a prototypes and the evaluation of achitectures really should be turned into specific projects (I like to run these projects in my group:-) ).

To me this more formal project management view actually answers some of the short comings in the way many IT projects are run and sold. Customers are only sold one project. We should sell them several. The first one being the "Fuzzy front end projects" - that is usability, design and architecture projects.