The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge

General Introduction

• The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, now in its third edition, is the Project Management Institute’s (“PMI”) flagship document. On it is based PMI’s very successful Project Management Professional (“PMP”) certification program and associated training and accreditation programs. This Guide has been developed by a large group of PMI volunteer members, in this latest case well over 200, who have an interest in this aspect of PMI’s activities. It is issued as an American National Standard.
• Notwithstanding, PMI is careful to note that while “it administers the process and establishes rules to promote fairness in the development of consensus, it does not write the document and it does not independently test, evaluate, or verify the accuracy or completeness of any information or the soundness of any judgments contained in its standards and guideline publications.”  And further, wisely disclaims any liability for “use of application, or reliance on this document.”  In short, buyers beware!
• The previous edition was issued in 2000, and this latest effort has clearly involved a substantial number of volunteer hours. The result has produced a doubling of the number of pages from around 200 to nearly 400. The question is: Does that represent an improvement and does it make sense? The answer is, of course, that there is good stuff and not-so-good stuff, but there are also some serious disappointments. Others may not agree exactly with our findings, but if this leads to constructive discussions and an improved document, everyone will benefit.

Guide Structure

• Like its 2000 predecessor, the Guide is divided into sections now consisting of five as follows:
  • The Project Management Framework;
  • The Standard for Project Management of a Project;
  • The Project Management Knowledge Areas;
  • Appendices;
  • Glossary.

Each section consists of one or more chapters. The second section has taken the previous Project Management Processes chapter and singled out these processes for special attention. As before, the largest section is The Project Management Knowledge Areas, which retain the same chapter numbering and, like its predecessor, the Guide is heavily systems-based following an input-process-output pattern.

• “The primary purpose of the PMBOK® Guide is to identify that subset of the Project Management Body of Knowledge that is generally recognized as good practice . . . [and] . . . means that the knowledge and practices described are applicable to most projects most of the time, and that there is widespread consensus about their value and usefulness.”  However, the text is presented in language that suggests a description of current practices, i.e. what is done, rather than as a standard conveying to members what should be done.
• IT people, and business analysts in particular, will be especially comfortable with this form of representation, even though each diagram carefully notes that “Not all process interactions and data flow among the processes are shown”. Another indicator is the introduction of the term “assets”, or more particularly “Organizational Process Assets”. This is defined in the Glossary as including “formal and informal plans, policies, procedures, and guidelines. The process assets also include the organizations’ knowledge bases such as lessons learned and historical information.”  In other words, it denotes the supporting paperwork.

What we liked

• In this latest Guide we feel that its authors have made the document much more readable with plenty of really good illustrative text with more detail. However, it also means far more to read. They have also made a sincere attempt to “normalize” the text especially amongst the nine knowledge area chapters. This means that there is more uniformity in approach, clarity in use of terminology, and consistency in presentation, even if that is not necessarily true of the content.
• In support of this, the authors have completely rewritten the Glossary to reflect the same approach and to define all of the Guide’s labels attached to every numbered article in the text. This clarity and consistency significantly improves the reader’s ability to understand the import of all the process labels especially those that have been introduced or changed. That means that the Glossary is now specific to the Guide, rather than general, so perhaps this will remove at least some of the controversy over terminology that presently exists in the project management marketplace.

Downside

• With the complicated systems view now adopted throughout the document, one has to ask whether this format is still suitable as a basis for project management learning, and/or as a general project management standard. Since most outputs reappear as inputs elsewhere, and the descriptions reappear accordingly, this leads to extra verbiage and the danger of conflicting information. A similar problem exists with outputs having the same name but generated from different sets of inputs.
• The question has also been raised whether, with double the number of pages of the previous version, will it take that much longer to study for the Project Management Professional certification exam? There should be no question that the Guide is a “knowledge” document and not a prescription for running a project. Nevertheless a legitimate question is: Does it help anyone to run a project? Perhaps it is time to rethink the approach.
• Interestingly, the authors have dropped the statement “Project management is an emerging profession” from the Guide’s “Purpose”. So presumably since 2000 and in their view, the project management profession has now arrived. Whether or not the Guide itself has finally arrived is another matter. The new Guide is more “process heavy” than its predecessor and one wonders if, in chasing all these processes, there will ever be any time left to do any actual project work!
• The 2000 version made the tacit assumption that each output is generated by only one process resulting from only one set of inputs. Further, with but one exception, each output that is not an end item is an input to a succeeding process. In other words, the whole represented substantial systems logic. This is not the case with the 2004 version where some outputs reappear as outputs from other processes with different inputs. Indeed, outputs from succeeding processes also appear as inputs to preceding processes.
• From Appendix A we learn that “The terms ‘Facilitating Processes’ and ‘Core Processes’ are no longer used. These terms have been eliminated to ensure that all project management processes in the Project Management Process Groups have the same level of importance”.  We should not be losing sight of the fact that the core processes ARE different from the facilitating processes. The former represent targets or constraints, i.e. what is to be achieved, while the latter represent the mechanics, i.e. how it is to be achieved. Therefore, you cannot facilitate until you know what your core processes are producing.

Missed opportunities

• Perhaps the single biggest disappointment is in the failure of the Guide’s authors to recognize and advocate for the proper deployment of the project life span technique. According to the Center for Research in the Management of Projects, University of Manchester, UK, the importance of this life span process and its influence on the management of the project cannot be over emphasized. This relatively short-term life-to-death environment and the consequences that flow, is probably the only thing that uniquely distinguishes projects from non-projects.  A properly formulated PLS(“Project Life Span”), with appropriate “gates” between the major phases, is the vehicle for the sponsor or the executive management of the performing organization to exercise control over the whole project management process. Many project failures can be directly attributed to a lack of a sound PLS process.
• If anything needed re-labeling it is the set of five project management process groups. While the authors have tried hard to clarify this difficult concept, the result is questionable.
• And while we are talking about wholesale change, it is high time that the knowledge area chapters were re-ordered into their logical sequence. This sequence was carefully considered, justified, and correctly presented in the 1987 version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge. Unfortunately, the logic of the sequence was lost on the developers of the subsequent 1996 version and, it seems, ever since. The current version makes great play of “organizational process assets (updates)” that, according to the Glossary includes “lessons learned”, since it appears as an output of the work of each knowledge area. The credibility of the Guide is challenged when it fails to apply its own recommendation.
• The importance of quality is once again underplayed, both by its position in the sequence of knowledge area chapters and its treatment of the term “grade”. “Grade” gets only a single passing mention in the document and that is in chapter 8 dedicated to Project Quality Management.  We may therefore infer that what is intended here is “Quality grade”. Like the three other “core” knowledge area variables, project quality management requires a “baseline” as a basis-for-comparison, i.e. “conformance to requirements”. This quality management baseline is the quality grade. Note that “grade”, i.e. quality grade baseline, is not mentioned in Chapter 5, Project Scope Management.
• One may legitimately question to what extent the Guide’s update-team were charged with researching previous Institute documents and current project management texts, given the paucity of references  for a document of this importance. It is also a matter for regret that none of the expertise of the senior members of the Institute, its Fellows, was available to the Standards Program Member Advisory Group during the development of this latest version of the Guide.  It is possible that soliciting their collective review could have made a difference and some of these disappointments might have been averted.

Based on:

Allpm’s review