In addition to the change management processes, the approach to project management will need to evolve with the shift to the cloud. The waterfall methodology, where the full requirements are identified in advance, and these requirements are then developed in sequence, with testing cycles happening at the end, is too slow for the business agility required. In the past, with the time associated with the provisioning of hardware, or the lack of team communication, slowing things down, the waterfall method worked to produce high-quality systems. With these barriers removed, the agile methodology is often used in the cloud. This style allows for parallel activities to occur, including requirement gathering, development, testing, and deployment. The cloud's ability to provision resources instantaneously and scale up when needed makes this project management style work really well. The speed with which the business needs to change requirements due to market conditions can be high, and managing projects with agility allows for quickly modifying requirements without a significant amount of rework.

When changing the project management processes to account for cloud first design principles, one important impact would be to include best practices for cloud native development. Including quality assurance checks in the design processes that identify best practices for designing scalable, secure, and cloud native architectures will ensure that workloads are deployed cloud-scale ready, and will need less remediation once they are in production. By incorporating these cloud native design practices into the project management processes, a company will start to develop cloud native architectures earlier, focus on automation and innovation from cloud vendors, and be in a position to change direction quickly, based on the needs of the business. These changes not only increase business velocity, but reduce risk.