ON THE EDGE
PMBOK® Guide 3 - The Future of Project Management?
by Carl Pritchard, Pritchard Management Associates
The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge is now in its 3rd Edition. Does it matter? It may. In fact, it may go a long way toward shaping the future of project management, and it may go a long way toward shaping the future of the Project Management Institute. We're one edition away from the future.
I confess to being a member of an elite group. I am probably one of the few people on the planet who have already taken it upon themselves to actually read the whole new PMBOK® Guide. I'm not a glutton for punishment, but because of a variety of client needs and demands for currency, I have found myself reading through the entire document. The update to the PMBOK® Guide is an interesting object lesson in how works completed "by committee" can take on some very interesting shapes. In my assessment, the shape of this document and its successor in the future have the potential to determine the long-term viability of project management as an accepted practice.
What's Great
PMBOK® Guide 3 has some great new facets. In the early chapters (particularly scope and integration), it pays specific homage to the mechanics of project management and the tools that lead to the greatest success, including the scope statement and the WBS. In fact, throughout the new guide, the tools and techniques have been expanded significantly.
The guide also plays up two vital aspects of project management very heavily. They are the environmental and organizational contexts of the project. Virtually every knowledge area grants some recognition to "enterprise environmental factors," which are the environment in which the project must evolve. Failure to acknowledge those factors can doom a project to failure. By driving home their importance, the PMBOK® Guide 3 goes a long way toward ensuring that they are noticed, acknowledged, and ultimately incorporated in the PMP® Certification exam. This means that they will become part of the project management discussion. That's critical, as many times project management is discussed in a theoretical vacuum, outside the organizational culture. The other aspect is "organizational process assets," which points to what supporting infrastructure exists for project managers to tap in establishing their projects. A culture with a lot of knowledge assets and informational assets has a much higher probability of success than one lacking in organizational process assets. The fact that the PMBOK® Guide 3 acknowledges the importance of this infrastructure will provide project managers with a defense of their positions in support of the evolution of these assets.
If more is better, the new PMBOK® Guide definitely meets the criterion. There are more specific tools and techniques, and many more outputs than in the previous editions. In many instances, the new tools and techniques reflect a greater level of depth than was embedded in the earlier editions of the PMBOK® Guide, including a host of practical insights (such as the detail associated with the project management plan and the examination of how lessons learned can be embedded in the organizational "process assets"). There are many elements of the new PMBOK® Guide that hold out great promise for the future of project management and our recognition as a "profession."
What May Be of Concern
Despite the increased volume of the Guide, some of the basic elements of project management as practiced in many types of organizations have been dropped. Other, newer elements have only recently surfaced, and yet have been included as standard practice.
Earned value has long been a staple of project management reporting. It is sufficiently important that it has been known to dominate a large chunk of the PMP® exam for some test-takers. (The exam is drawn from a pool of questions, so some test-takers dodge this bullet.) In the second edition of the PMBOK® Guide, PMI dropped the classic terms for earned value (budgeted cost of work scheduled, budgeted cost of work performed) in deference to a new set of terms (planned value, earned value) and acronyms. The software packages have never followed suit, and neither has the U.S. Federal government, the largest single user of earned value. While the new terms are easily seen as more user-friendly, the old terms merit higher visibility, since they will be more readily visible in most actual application.
The Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) is another component of classic project management with a long and storied history (dating back to 1958). It didn't even make the glossary in the latest edition, supplanted by 3-point data estimates. While the three-point estimate is, again, more convenient, it doesn't have the scientific or mathematical background of PERT. (PERT is based on the Runge-Kutta method of normalizing differential equations.) While PERT has been dropped by the PMBOK® Guide, the application of the tool remains embedded in most of the popular project management software packages, as well as in virtually every collegiate text in project and risk management.
Other, newer elements, while welcome additions, raise the question of validation. Some writings on three-point estimates compare them favorably to PERT, without providing any long-term mathematical history or scientific backing. And while the Risk Breakdown Structure is an exciting and promising tool, the first significant presentation of the RBS came at a PMI; National Congress only three years ago (2002) in San Antonio. It's exciting stuff, but is there already widespread application? (If so, it's a tribute to Dr. David Hillson, a true project management craftsman, who has been the ultimate champion of the RBS.)
So Is It the Future?
That is the major question. PMI® is definitely blazing new trails with the latest edition, creating exciting and dynamic possibilities for project management practice. If PMI's goal was to be cutting-edge, then the new PMBOK® Guide accomplishes that with ease. The guide affords a sense of the potential future of project management and some of the ways in which the classic tools and approaches to the craft can be remodeled to make life easier. The guide also "clears the decks" of some of the older practices, even while those practices remain embedded in many software packages and in quite a few organizational cultures. The primary purpose of the PMBOK® Guide, according to its first page, is "to identify that subset of the Project Management Body of Knowledge that is generally recognized as good practice." Given that the latest edition of the Guide represents a sea change from the previous edition, in approach, size, tools, and language, the real test will probably come in the PMBOK® Guide, 4th Edition. If PMI can achieve relative stability in terms of their terms, practices, tools and approach, without dramatically altering this latest version, it will be a sign that the profession is beginning to see itself in a more consistent light. Should PMBOK® Guide 4th Edition be another major shift from this guide, it may indicate that project practice cannot be defined consistently, and the profession cannot "generally recognize" a consistent subset of behaviors.
For now, however, PMBOK® Guide 3 affords a rich and powerful tool for our application, and as has been said (in TV promotions and elsewhere), "the future has yet to be written."
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