Difference Between Standard and Methodology

The intent of almost every good organization is to follow processes and procedures that helps in achieving success on the project, gain customer satisfaction, improves quality while keeping the project with in the allocated constraints like Cost and Schedule etc.So every organization tend to choose any standard or process based on the needs of there organization. So in general these processes or practices could be summarized into two broad categories (Standard and Methodology).

What is the difference between Standard and Methodology

What is Methodology ? : Methodology can be referred to as “A collection of methods, processes and practices that are repeated over and over again”. This means that the same practices are followed on almost every project .

What is Standard ? : A standard is basically ” A collection of knowledge areas which are considered good practices with in the industry.

A general difference between Standard and Methodology could be that methodology will give you practical processes for getting the project done while on the other hand the standard will guide you on the best practice followed with in that industry. A methodology is normally a well designed framework or documented procedure while a standard is the best practice that have been tested and implemented with in the industry.

A standard will never ever be a methodology but a methodology can be adopted from a standard, both the standard and methodology have there pros and cons but I won’t get into much details in this blog post specially and may be we do cover this topic in detail but the idea was to give a general over view of the difference between standard and methodology.

The example that we can use for the difference between standard and methodology is PMBOK as a standard and Prince2 as a methodology.