What are the various types of Projects?

We have so many different types of project management methodologies - from waterfall, to iterative, to scrum to kanban... how to you differentiate them?

Well there are different ways to look at it. A good many of those you'll definitely find in various corners of the internet. However, there's one perspective that I do find extremely fascinating - the concept of flow. The concept derives from Physics and Mechanical Engineering, so I won't go into the details of the subject, but look more at the essence of the subject. And that is... to ask - how much of flow does one methodology bring to one project management methodology compared to another.

SDLC Types

There are many factors to flow, but one of the key aspects is - the more number of chunks you make of something, the higher the increase in flow. A simple waterfall based project is like a big rock, when you move towards Iterative and Incremental, you start to break the rock into smaller rocks (of a few months durations each). Into Scrum, you start breaking the rocks into smaller stones (of a week to 4 week durations). And when you move into pure kanban, you start to make the stones into very small powdery dust (tasks of a few hours duration).

It does not mean one is better than the other... that depends on what you have for transportation - a crane for lifting the rock or trucks to transport the stones or water pipes to pump the sand along with water.