Practicing the PMBOK® Guide 7th Edition with PMPeople

The new edition of the PMBOK® Guide is not based on knowledge areas anymore, but on 8 performance domains describing the most important activities to achieve value results in the project. PMI has also changed the ANSI Standard for Project Management from 49 processes to 12 principles guiding the behavior of the professional project manager.

I think these changes were really needed:

• Professional project managers needed a reference closer to real practice. They still need to be fluent on standardized project management processes to get a structured knowledge in mind, to speak the same language, etc., but they don’t usually apply the processes as they are in the guide. For instance, we know that, in order to get the schedule, first we should define activities, sequence them, estimate activity resource requirements, estimate activity durations, and finally optimize the model to fit the schedule constraints. We normally don’t follow these processes step by step, since we usually mix all scheduling planning processes going back and forth using a scheduling tool. Nevertheless, knowing about processes, inputs, outputs, tools, and techniques is worth it, especially for not “reinventing the wheel”: All a project manager may need is already invented.
• PMBOK® Guide 6th edition was quite too big. It seemed like a student book, more than a body of knowledge. Readers got the wrong idea that all the necessary knowledge to manage all kind of projects was included in the guide, being this requirement impossible to meet, especially for adaptive projects. Process-wise content made people think they were reading a kind of methodology, but the guide should be a framework, not a method.
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Professional project management is no longer effective if projects are managed in isolation—project team makes all—or by managed by meetings or by reporting. Stakeholders’ continuous collaboration is needed to achieve the project management goals, that is: delivering value on time, under budget, with the right quality, etc. In this hyper connected world, continuous collaboration in projects means online collaboration to take informed decisions and propose actions proactively. Projects need this kind of distributed collaboration, especially. Organizations don’t need bureaucracy related to documentation or status meetings. Organizations need online real time reporting and agile transparency mechanisms on project statuses. Professionals of the project economy should master their power skills. Projects succeed when people collaborate. The guide and the standard had to change the approach to results and principles, respectively.

In the project economy, many stakeholders need to be engaged beyond the review meetings. Team members, many of them working remotely, are expected to comment proactively on problems, alternatives, workarounds, conflicts, needs, etc. Project managers are not good professionals if they just follow orders. They need to be proactive to manage risks, model requirements, to finish on time, under budget, maximizing value, etc. Project managers are not alone in management. We need project management teams, instead.

I have recently been assigned as interim project manager in a software project with the team divided among UK, Colombia and India. Still fresh in my mind my first reading of the PMBOK Guide, the webinar in PMI Madrid and the clarifying videos by Ricardo Vargas, I have tried to initiate this project trying to apply the concepts. Quoting Stephen R. Covey: “To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.”

To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know. –Stephen R. Covey

After our first project review meeting, I’ve convinced myself that I can follow the principles easily because I have the habit of updating the project data in PMPeople and, on the other hand, I can show performance results to stakeholders because they can get the evidence they need directly on PMPeople. I can see our tool PMPeople as the “conveyor belt” to move gears of professional project management in the project economy.