Introduction
Project management is becoming more difficult. Today, projects must deliver results faster, adapt to changing technologies, control costs, and meet sustainability requirements, all with limited people and resources. Moreover, projects are becoming more interconnected, which makes it harder for teams to predict and manage all the challenges from the start.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) 2026 Pulse of the Profession report states that 97% of project professionals managed at least one complex project in the previous year, and 81% say projects have become more complex in recent years. Approximately 31% of complex projects did not achieve the full benefits for which they had been intended. The PMI also discovered that projects which were managed effectively in order to deal with complexity were five times more likely to succeed.
Frugal project management has become more relevant than ever. This approach involves more than just cutting costs; it is about identifying the areas where resources generate the most value and steering clear of unnecessary spending, features, processes and effort.
What Does Frugal Project Management Mean?
The ideas behind frugal project management are derived from frugal innovation, which involves organisations creating useful solutions even when they have limited resources. A study from 2023, published in Technovation and using data from 1,097 companies in Brazil, India and the United States, found that frugal innovation has three main aspects: concentrating on core functionalities, achieving significant cost reductions and promoting sustainable engagement.
When it comes to project management, one should ask simple questions during the project: What exactly does the customer need? Which activities are necessary? Is it possible to use an existing resource rather than buying a new one? And can an idea be tested on a small scale before spending a large amount of money?
For instance, a team that is planning a new internal process needn’t buy a new project-management platform right away. Since the organisation is already using tools like Excel, Microsoft Teams or some other collaboration platform, it can make use of these to try out the process first. Only if the pilot trial demonstrates that further capabilities are actually needed should the organisation then proceed with investing in a specialised solution.
What we want to achieve is not to select the cheapest option automatically, but to make sure that each important decision regarding resources has a well-defined purpose.
Turning Constraints into Practical Decisions
It is normally regarded as a project constraint if the budget is limited, the team is small, or the deadline is short. Frugal project management then considers whether or not that constraint can be used to encourage the team to simplify the solution.
Imagine that a company is introducing a new customer-support process. Rather than putting the process into effect at all its locations at the same time, the project team might try it out with just one department or one customer group. They could then assess the response time, gather customer feedback and identify any operational problems before deciding if it should be expanded. This method lowers the cost of failure and provides the project team with evidence prior to making a greater investment.
The same principle holds in the case of technology projects. A team might have at its disposal an existing database, a software licence or an internal reporting system which could be used to carry out the first stage of the project. By reusing these resources, the team will be able to discover exactly what is needed before buying further technology.
Frugal Does Not Mean Low Quality
A widespread misconception is that a frugal solution is just a cheaper alternative to one that already exists. That, however, is not the aim of frugality. A frugal method involves concentrating on the most important functions while at the same time decreasing the use of unnecessary resources. That is the reason why frugal project management ought not to involve cutting back on essential testing, getting rid of vital resources or selecting inappropriate technology simply because it is cheaper.
For instance, in the case of a project that includes a customer-facing application, cutting back on testing to cut costs could result in defects, complaints, and extra expenses later on. A more effective method would be to determine the most important customer journeys and make sure they are thoroughly tested before investing time and resources in less important features.
Sustainability also comes into play here. It is possible to promote both financial and environmental goals by reusing existing resources, cutting down on unnecessary travel, limiting material waste and avoiding excessive consumption of technology.
Frugal AI: Choosing the Right Level of Technology
The use of artificial intelligence is one area in which cost-effective thinking is becoming important; although it can increase productivity, not all projects call for the most massive or most expensive model.
Let’s imagine that a customer-service project has to classify the queries it receives and send them to the appropriate team; in that case, the project team could decide whether a smaller, task-specific model is adequate rather than automatically choosing a large general-purpose model.
The fact that AI has an environmental cost shows just how important these decisions are. A study carried out by Google and the University of California, Berkeley, which was cited by MIT, estimated that the electricity used to train GPT-3 amounted to about 1,287 MWh and that it produced roughly 552 metric tons of carbon dioxide. The point is that organisations need not avoid AI; rather, project teams should adapt the technology to the particular problem. A simple business problem shouldn’t automatically call for the most complicated technical solution.
The Wadhwani AI Example
A practical example of frugal innovation can be found in the work of Wadhwani AI, a non-profit organisation established in 2018 by Romesh Wadhwani and Sunil Wadhwani. The organisation was founded with the objective of applying artificial intelligence to large-scale social challenges, particularly in low-resource environments.
They have created the cotton pest-management programme with agricultural conditions in mind, especially in areas where resources and connectivity are limited; it uses a mobile phone camera and ordinary pest traps to detect pests and gives farmers useful information. Furthermore, the researchers have designed the system so that it can operate without the need for continuous internet connectivity by running the AI model on the phone.
It is important because the solution was based on the real conditions faced by its users. Rather than assuming that farmers would have access to costly equipment or constant connectivity, the project used resources that were more easily available.
The following point is valuable for project managers: they should begin by identifying the problem and the conditions under which the solution will be used, and then determine just how much technology is really needed.
From Completing Projects to Creating Value
The eighth edition of the PMBOK® Guide, which was published by PMI in November 2025, places a greater focus on value delivery, adaptability and accountability. The guide also advises project professionals to adjust the practices, tools and techniques to suit their specific context.
This is in agreement with the concept of frugal project management; a project should not be evaluated solely based on what it delivers, but rather on whether the resources that were invested have produced significant results.
For example, a project might include ten new features since they were part of the original plan; but if the customers end up using only three, the additional development work may have created only a small amount of value. A frugal approach would therefore urge the team to determine which features address important customer problems and to prioritise those.
This point is even more crucial in a situation where resources are limited. Each extra feature, tool, meeting, process or cost should have a clear justification for being there.
Frugal project management is therefore not a matter of carrying out less just because one wants to carry out less; it is about carrying out what is important, using resources with care and gaining experience before making bigger commitments.
As projects become more complex, this mindset can help teams remain practical and focused. Constraints will always exist. The opportunity for project managers is to use those constraints to find simpler, sustainable, and valuable ways to deliver results.
References
- PMI (2026). Pulse of the Profession® 2026: Driving Success in Complex Projects.
- PMI (2025). PMBOK® Guide – Eighth Edition.
- Rossetto, D. E., Borini, F. M., Bernardes, R. C., & Frankwick, G. L. (2023) “Measuring frugal innovation capabilities: An initial scale proposition.” Technovation, 121, 102674.
- Dalmia, A. et al. (2020) “Pest Management in Cotton Farms: An AI-System Case Study from the Global South.” Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
- MIT Better World. “Explained: Generative AI’s Environmental Impact.”
IPM CPM Level 1
