The fadeaway project management methodology

The best project management framework or methodology is the one that can fade away easily in the background. In other words, if one is doing the right things, it does not get in the way and it doesn't add new work. The latter part applies both to the practitioners as well as to the standard setters / bearers inside an organization. Enforcing a process should not be a thing. Educating practitioners on the process is the standard setter's mission; if it needs to be enforced, then something is going against the grain.

But are project participants doing the right thing if no one is looking? If there are no PMO enforcers to look at how you are applying the methodology? Is 'what makes sense' congruous with 'what the methodology prescribes'? In a nutshell, it does not matter. If project participants cannot rationalize what they are doing with the conceptual framework of the methodology, then the methodology (or its application) is too heavy handed and it get in the way.

I found that more often than not when people have to work at implementing a process or maintaining its repeatability across an organization, the spirit of the methodology often gets lost. The best run projects are those that don't have to think about methodology, but where the methodology becomes second nature, embedded into everything from individual contributor's updates to team communications and collaboration. It becomes second nature, it feels natural to do things in a certain way. It also becomes natural to speak in certain circumstances and it becomes part of everybody's function to act in a way that enacts the abstractions of the methodology.