Technique library
Every technique Driftless works with, explained — the tools and techniques the PMBOK ITTO catalog names, and any Driftless adds to its own vocabulary that no process names — when to use each, when not to, the steps, what it produces and what usually goes wrong. Theory reference: nothing here reads a project or a date.
How to read this page
The library is grouped by family — the kind of work a technique belongs to. Each family opens with what it is for, then one row per technique: its name, what it is for in a line, and how much help this product gives you with it. Open any technique for when to use it, when not to, the steps in order, what it produces and what usually goes wrong.
- Runnable here
- Driftless has an assistant you can open and run for it — 55 of 90.
- Worksheet
- No calculator, but a printable worksheet walks you through it — 35 of 90.
- Anything else
- The column holds the one sentence recorded beside that technique saying why this product explains it rather than running it — 0 of 90.
General
Techniques that serve any part of a project — gathering information, weighing options, judging what the numbers are telling you — rather than belonging to one specialism.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Communication Methods | Choosing how a message travels: a live back-and-forth, a message sent out, or one people retrieve on their own. | Runnable here |
| Communication Models | Tracing how a message actually moves from one person's mind to another's, to see where it broke down. | Worksheet |
| Communication Requirements Analysis | Working out who needs which information, in what form, and how often, before choosing a channel for any of it. | Worksheet |
| Communication Skills | The personal abilities, like clarity, tone, and listening, that make a specific communication actually land. | Worksheet |
| Communication Technology | Choosing the medium a message travels over, based on urgency, privacy, audience size, and how much tone matters. | Runnable here |
| Data Analysis | The general term for methods that turn data you already have into a conclusion. | Worksheet |
| Data Gathering | The general term for methods that collect information a project does not already have. | Worksheet |
| Data Representation | The general term for turning analyzed data into a picture a reader can absorb quickly. | Worksheet |
| Decision Making | The general term for how a group turns its options into one chosen course of action. | Worksheet |
| Expert Judgment | Asking someone experienced for a judgment call instead of working the answer out from scratch yourself. | Worksheet |
| Interpersonal and Team Skills | The general term for people-facing skills, like listening and influencing, a project manager uses directly. | Worksheet |
| Meetings | A deliberately convened session where specific people decide something or share status together. | Runnable here |
| Project Management Information System | The tools that hold a project's working data and make it usable by the team. | Worksheet |
| Project Reporting | Collecting and distributing project status and progress in the format each audience actually needs. | Worksheet |
Integration
Holding the whole project together: choosing what to do, approving changes, and keeping the separate plans consistent with one another.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Change Control Tools | Deciding whether a proposed change to an already-approved plan is accepted, and updating the plan only once it is. | Worksheet |
| Information Management | The tools and habits for storing and finding project documents already written down. | Worksheet |
| Knowledge Management | Moving know-how from the person who has it to the person who needs it. | Worksheet |
Scope
Deciding and writing down exactly what the project will deliver, and what it will not, so later work can be checked against it.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Benchmarking | Comparing your project against similar organizations or projects to find a useful target, a gap, or a practice worth copying. | Runnable here |
| Context Diagram | One picture of a system as a box, showing everything outside it that it touches. | Runnable here |
| Decomposition | Splitting project work into progressively smaller pieces until each is small enough to plan and track. | Runnable here |
| Inspection | Checking a finished deliverable against its requirements before it is formally accepted. | Runnable here |
| Product Analysis | Turning a stated product idea into a defined, actionable set of requirements and deliverables. | Runnable here |
| Prototypes | Building a working model of a product early, so stakeholders can react to something real. | Runnable here |
Schedule
Working out the order of the work, how long each piece takes, and when it has to happen to hit the dates.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Agile Release Planning | Deciding which features ship in which release from a prioritized backlog and the team's known speed, not a fixed long-range schedule. | Runnable here |
| Analogous Estimating | Estimate a task's duration or cost by pointing at a genuinely similar past task and scaling from what that one actually took. | Runnable here |
| Bottom Up Estimating | Estimating each smallest piece of work separately, then adding them up for the most accurate, most labor-intensive total. | Runnable here |
| Critical Chain Method | Scheduling around resource limits, removing padding from individual tasks, and pooling that padding into shared buffers. | Runnable here |
| Critical Path Method | Finding the longest chain of dependent tasks, the one whose length sets how soon the project can finish. | Runnable here |
| Dependency Determination | Sorting each link between tasks into what is a fixed fact and what is really a choice. | Worksheet |
| Leads and Lags | Adjusting timing between two linked tasks so one starts early or is deliberately delayed. | Runnable here |
| Parametric Estimating | Estimating by multiplying a known amount of work by a rate drawn from past data. | Runnable here |
| Precedence Diagramming Method | Drawing the schedule as linked task boxes, so its order is a picture, not a memory. | Runnable here |
| Resource Optimization | Adjusting the schedule to fit real resource limits, either by delaying work or shifting it within slack. | Runnable here |
| Rolling Wave Planning | Planning near-term work in detail and far-off work only roughly, refining it as it gets closer. | Worksheet |
| Schedule Compression | Shortening a schedule without cutting scope, by adding resources or overlapping tasks. | Runnable here |
| Schedule Network Analysis | The general term for techniques that build a project schedule from its task dependencies. | Runnable here |
| Three Point Estimating | Combining an optimistic, a pessimistic, and a most-likely estimate into one figure. | Runnable here |
Cost
Estimating what the work will cost, setting the budget, and tracking the spend against it as the work proceeds.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Aggregation | Adding up cost estimates from the smallest tasks up through the whole project into one traceable budget. | Runnable here |
| Cost of Quality | Sorting quality spending into four buckets, to see if a project pays to prevent defects or fix them. | Runnable here |
| Earned Value Analysis | Comparing planned, completed, and spent work at one point in time to judge cost and schedule performance. | Runnable here |
| Financing | Arranging outside funding to cover project costs the owner's own cash cannot carry. | Runnable here |
| Funding Limit Reconciliation | Reshaping planned spending so it never asks for more money than is actually available each period. | Runnable here |
| Historical Information Review | Pulling actual cost, schedule, and estimating data from comparable past projects to sanity-check or ground a current estimate, instead of estimating from a blank page. | Runnable here |
| Reserve Analysis | Setting aside one budget cushion inside the cost baseline for known risks, and another outside the baseline for the unknown. | Runnable here |
| To-Complete Performance Index | The cost efficiency remaining work must hit to land on a realistic target cost. | Runnable here |
Quality
Deciding what good enough means for the deliverables, then checking both the work and the way it is being done against that.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Audits | A structured, independent check of whether the project's actual quality process was followed — as distinct from whether the product it produced meets its requirements. | Runnable here |
| Design for X | A family of design rules that shapes a product around one specific later concern, like safety or cost. | Worksheet |
| Problem Solving | A disciplined path from noticing something is wrong to a tested fix. | Worksheet |
| Quality Improvement Methods | Formal, repeatable programs that drive down defects or variation across many measured cycles over time. | Worksheet |
| Root Cause Analysis | Tracing a problem back to the condition that, once fixed, stops the whole pattern recurring. | Runnable here |
| Test and Inspection Planning | Deciding, while quality is still being planned, what will be checked, how, and when. | Worksheet |
| Testing Product Evaluations | Checking a finished product itself against its requirements, not the process that made it. | Worksheet |
Resource
Finding, assigning and developing the people and equipment the work needs, and keeping the load on them realistic.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Colocation | Putting most of a project team in one physical workspace to get faster, more informal communication. | Runnable here |
| Conflict Management | Resolving disagreement between team members on purpose, by picking a response that fits the situation. | Runnable here |
| Individual and Team Assessments | Using a structured tool, like a survey or profile, to surface team strengths and friction points. | Runnable here |
| Influencing | Getting cooperation from people the project manager has no formal authority over, using relationships, evidence, and persuasion instead of a reporting line that doesn't exist. | Worksheet |
| Negotiation | Working out directly with whoever controls a resource the terms on which the project gets it. | Worksheet |
| Organizational Theory | Using known patterns of how people and teams behave to decide how to lead the project team. | Runnable here |
| Pre Assignment | Naming who will do the work before the project is even approved or planned. | Runnable here |
| Recognition and Rewards | Formally acknowledging and rewarding behavior the project needs more of — explicitly tied to what actually helped the project, not handed out generically for morale. | Runnable here |
| Team Building | Deliberate activities that build how well a team works together, not just its skills. | Runnable here |
| Training | Deliberately building a skill or certification a team member needs but doesn't yet have, aimed at a specific project need rather than general professional development. | Runnable here |
| Virtual Teams | Building a team that rarely shares a physical location, on purpose and with care. | Runnable here |
Risk
Finding what could go wrong or unexpectedly right, judging how much it would matter, and deciding what to do about it in advance.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Contingent Response Strategies | A backup plan held in reserve and used only if a specific, named event actually happens. | Runnable here |
| Decision Tree Analysis | Mapping an uncertain decision as branching choices and chances, then weighing each branch's likely value. | Runnable here |
| Influence Diagrams | A network diagram showing how decisions, uncertain events, and outcomes affect one another. | Worksheet |
| Prompt Lists | Working through a predetermined list of risk categories to surface risks a free-form discussion would miss. | Worksheet |
| Representations of Uncertainty | Describing an uncertain amount as a range instead of one falsely precise number. | Worksheet |
| Risk Categorization | Grouping identified risks by source or area so patterns become visible instead of staying a flat list. | Worksheet |
| Risk Probability and Impact Assessment | Rating each risk's likelihood and effect on agreed scales so risks can be fairly compared. | Runnable here |
| Sensitivity Analysis | Changing one uncertain input at a time to see which ones actually move the outcome. | Worksheet |
| Simulation | Running a risk model many times with varying inputs to see the range of likely outcomes. | Worksheet |
| Strategies for Opportunities | Choosing a deliberate response to a risk that would help the project if it happened. | Runnable here |
| Strategies for Overall Project Risk | Responding to a project's risk as one combined whole, not just risk by risk. | Runnable here |
| Strategies for Threats | Choosing a deliberate response to a risk that would hurt the project if it happened. | Runnable here |
Procurement
Deciding what to buy rather than build, choosing who to buy it from, and managing the agreements that result.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising | Publishing a notice that a project is seeking vendors, so the field of respondents isn't limited to whoever the buyer already happens to know. | Worksheet |
| Bidder Conferences | A meeting where every prospective vendor asks questions before proposals are due, so everyone hears the same answers. | Worksheet |
| Claims Administration | Handling a disputed change to a contract by following the contract's own rules for settling disagreements. | Worksheet |
| Inspections and Audits | Checking a vendor's finished work and its working process against what the contract requires. | Worksheet |
| Make-or-Buy Analysis | Comparing doing work yourself against buying it from an outside vendor before deciding. | Runnable here |
| Procurement Performance Reviews | Checking, at regular intervals, how a live contract is actually performing against its terms. | Worksheet |
| Proposal Evaluation | Scoring the proposals actually received against a set of criteria to compare them fairly. | Runnable here |
| Source Selection Analysis | Choosing how you will pick a vendor before you start looking for one. | Runnable here |
Stakeholder
Working out who is affected by the project, what each of them needs from it, and how to keep them properly involved.
| Technique | What it is for | How much help |
|---|---|---|
| Autocratic Decision Making | One person — usually the project manager or another accountable role — makes the decision alone, without a group vote or consensus process. | Runnable here |
| Focus Groups | A guided discussion where a small group's interaction, not just each answer, is what gets studied. | Runnable here |
| Ground Rules | A team's written agreement on how it will behave, made before any real disagreement tests it. | Worksheet |
| Multicriteria Decision Analysis | Scoring several options against stated, weighted criteria, so the choice is traceable rather than argued. | Runnable here |
| Stakeholder Analysis | Finding everyone with a stake in the project, and recording what each one wants and can affect. | Runnable here |
| Stakeholder Engagement Assessment Matrix | A table comparing a stakeholder's current involvement against the involvement a project actually needs from them. | Runnable here |
| Voting | A group decides by each member stating a preference, then applying an agreed rule to it. | Runnable here |