There are a wide variety of frameworks or methodologies that project managers use to keep projects on track, corral stakeholders while working with the development team to indicate what the product backlog actually consists of, and to translate this information into market value for each product vary widely across industries and types of projects. However, a general consensus hasn’t emerged in 2019 on which frameworks and methodologies are best.

SlashData recently conducted a Developer Economics study, which touches on project management practices to gauge which are actually in use, found that 37% of respondents said that Scrum is utilized in their company. It’s important to note that this date encapsulates all developers, both professional and amateur, which may be skewing the numbers lower than they would be if only professional developers were questioned. Additionally, these respondents said they use Scrum 45% of the time when it’s in use, which means it’s not an across-all-projects framework but rather a when-it-fits tool.

While 37% is nowhere near a majority, 21% of respondents also said the company they work for or the team they work on use Agile-Waterfall hybrids like Scrummerfall or Waterscrum. While these aren’t Scrum in its original form, a lot of the concepts overlap or only slightly deviate from each other, which may give the framework even more prominence for Project Managers in 2019 and beyond.

Kanban, Waterfall, FDD, and nothing specific or nothing at all were the only other frameworks and methodologies with over 10% of respondents indicating they use them. In fact, nothing at all was selected by 23% of respondents while nothing specific was selected by 19%. It’s hard to reach a general consensus across industries, company size, size of development teams, and numerous other differences between technical teams. However, this survey gives a glimpse of what is being used at a wider scope and which methodologies are taking a bit of a backseat or only work well in certain niches. For Project Managers who want to generalize, Agile/Scrum familiarity seems necessary. However, if you’re a Project Manager looking to specialize in a certain industry, company size, or project size, you may need to specialize in some of the lesser-used frameworks and methodologies.

That being said, Agile/Scrum environments are gaining steam and it’s important for most Project Managers to at least be familiar with its concept of small, iterative projects that leverage feedback to create continuous improvement as well as the contents of the Agile Manifesto in 2019 and in the future.