I've been increasingly grumpy lately about the number of people who are taking polarized views of delivery frameworks and insisting that 'their' way is the only true north.
Whilst it is great to see so much passion about delivery approaches, it is important that we don't let such biases cloud our judgement. There are many ways to deliver value. Experienced PMs should be able to select the best tools for the job - be they from the Guide to the PMBoK, from the Prince 2 methodology or from one of the many Agile frameworks. Project Managers should understand the differences between approaches and the relative merits of each. Crucially, experienced project management professionals should be able to mix and match to develop customized approaches for each of their projects. If our projects are unique, shouldn't it follow that our approaches should be hand-picked too?
PMOs need to rise above the debate too, creating flexible lifecycles for project delivery whilst adopting the best of what operational teams have to offer in terms of repeatability and efficiency. I've included some more thoughts on the Waterfall vs Agile debate here. [1]
What do you think?