“There are only two options: make progress or make excuses.” Tony Robbins
“Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.” Thor Heyerdahl
PMI retired the 6th Edition of the PMBOK in March 2022, however the current version of the Project Management Professional® (PMP) exam preparation course material extensively references that retired document. I pointed that out in a post on October 19. You can link to that post here:
Three days after that post, PMI solved the problem. Here is a link to the announcement about the just issued a Process Group Practice Guide:
I’ve done a quick review of the document, and it will be familiar to anyone who routinely used the 6th Edition as a reference for a predictive project. The back of the document contains a couple of excellent reference sections, including Inputs and Outputs, Tools and Techniques and an extensive reference list. Agile methodologies have been removed.
The biggest format difference is how the Knowledge Areas are presented. In the 6th Edition, the document walks through the information by presenting all the activities that would occur in each Knowledge Area in a single section. The Knowledge Area is introduced, then the document explains what would occur in Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling and Closing.
The Practice Guide takes a different approach. The Knowledge Areas are not presented individually at once, rather they are grouped into the activities that would occur individually in Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling and Closing. Interestingly, that is an approach that many instructors took when presenting the material. The new format combined with excellent reference tools make the Practice Guide a useful document for a predictive project.
I’ll walk through the document in more detail in future posts, but I already found something very interesting. I can’t find traceability and it isn’t defined in the glossary definitions. When I looked it up in the index, I found this: Traceability matrices, 41, 226–227, 339. However, those pages contain no reference to traceability.
Is this an oversight? Traceability is a foundational concept, and the traceability matrix is a key tool in ensuring that the business benefits are delivered through the elicited requirements. I'll continue to review the new Process Groups Practice Guide and share my findings in future posts.
In the meantime, if any of my Project Management colleagues find anything interesting in the new Guide, please share that with me.
Coda
Many organizations use Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Every year the executives and the management team are asked to use the SMART framework to come up with KPI’s for the upcoming year. In a rational world, KPI's would reflect organizational performance. If your organization didn't do well, your KPI"s would reflect that and bonuses and pay raises would be tied to that. We would also tie those KPI’s to promotion opportunities, and in doing so would only promote people with a quantitatively documented history of performance. Do you think that is how it works? You live in the real world. What do you think?