Now, while I advocate variety is the spice of life in all personal matters, when it comes to having repeatable consistency in professional endeavors, companies don’t want to find themselves reinventing the wheel with every new project.  I have sometimes seen project managers struggling to figure out how to get started or what to do next when they’ve executed similar projects before.  When an organization is getting started establishing a project management methodology, I find it best to start simple.  Gather a set of tools and templates that the teams agree to use into a company toolkit, store them in a common place, and make a checklist of when and in what order to use them.

Getting started can be just that simple and you can start with a basic set of tools and add to it as you find the need.  There are a number of good sources of free project management templates on the internet, but some of my favorites are www.gantthead.com,  www.projectconnections.com , http://techrepublic.com , www.ittoolkit.com,   www.mppm.com, http://www.controlchaos.com, http://www.hyperthot.com, http://www.developer.com,   and  http://www.targetprocess  as well as the more notable sites such as http://office.microsoft.com , and http://www.mks.com .   You will probably want to consider a project charter document, a scope document, project schedule, issue log, risk register, status report, and communication plan at a minimum.  There are no standards out there about what these documents have to look like – the key is what works for your organization.  The important thing is that everyone who will have to maintain them or consume them is comfortable in using them and that they serve their purpose.  So download a few templates and get a team together to modify as needed.  The exercise can be a great teambuilding event by itself.

As you execute projects and add more tools, your toolkit becomes more extensive and your methodology becomes more like a framework.   As any carpenter does with a well stocked toolkit before he begins a job he assesses the job and takes out just the tools he needs.   What I recommend is that you develop a checklist that walks you through when to start each template in cases where they are applicable.  For example if you are doing an external procurement, you will need to prepare an RFP for that project so, when in the sequence is that tool created?   At the beginning of each project you can then simply walk down your checklist and pick off the steps that are applicable, grab your organizationally customized template from your repository, and away you go.  After a while it will feel very repetitive, but then that was the point, wasn’t it? – consistency!   Get your variety fix the next time you stop for your morning latte.