The Project Management Institute (PMI) has released updates to four globally-accepted project management standards. Updated standards include:
Global teams began reviewing the four standards in December 2006 and finished their work in August 2008. The simultaneous release of these four standards allowed PMI's global standards working teams to ensure these standards are "fully harmonized" with each other for the first time, the organization said in a statement.
The goals for the harmonization process included assessing inconsistencies and aligning language. "If a term is used, we agreed that there was no room for poetic license, they all needed to be used verbatim across standards and ultimately in the standards lexicon," said Beth Ouellette content integration analyst for the standards update project.
To get the process started, the teams agreed to use the PMBOK Guide as the base document on which all other standards would be verified. "We also agreed that the Program Standard would 'own' those things exclusive to a program, and that the Portfolio Standard would 'own' those things exclusive to a portfolio," said Ouellette. Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) became the standard that lifted the standards to an organizational level.
The teams also built in processes to create alignment, consistency, and clarity across all four standards. Comparison tables were used to alert the teams to intersections of commonality and areas that needed coordination. "We had face-to-face meetings to hammer out conflicts, inconsistencies, and contradictions. And with all of these events, there was careful pre-planning, collaboration, information, and data reviews, recommendations and suggestions," said Ouellette.
For the fourth edition of the PMBOK Guide, the project team made several improvements. The first was the inclusion of project documents, such as issue logs, duration estimates, and resource requirements, to aid project managers in project execution.
Another noticeable change, said Cynthia Stackpole, project manager for the PMBOK Guide update, was the combination of the change request, corrective action, preventive action, and defect repair groupings into one heading called "Change Requests." "Our goal was to bring about clarity and have the specific planning process outputs serve as inputs to developing the project management plan and not the other way around," Stackpole says.
The second edition of OPM3, PMI's best practice standard for enterprise improvement, includes the introduction of organizational enablers. "These are the structural-, cultural-, technological-, and human resource-focused best practices, which underpin the implementation of best practices in projects, programs, and portfolios," said Tim MacFadyen, project manager for the new edition. "This ultimately helps foster project management within an organization and helps project managers anchor processes within the organization."
The team also updated the standard's self-assessment method (SAM) questions -- refining the offering from 151 to 120 questions. "The goal was to make the SAMs very straightforward -- clearing up any confusion and facilitating application for PMP [credential holders]," MacFadyen said. "Our goal was to simplify and make sure people find solid use of the standard."
"The most significant aspect of the latest edition of The Standard for Program Management is the development of knowledge areas specific to programs," explained Frank Parth, project manager for the update. "It gives the program managers a significant amount of information that is relevant to managing large, complex programs."
The second edition provides a consistent framework to adequately assess project, program, or portfolio management. "For the first time we are talking about governance and audits," said Parth. "Both topics are highly relevant to programs but have not been included in any standards before."
The second edition of PMI's standard for portfolio management brings provides more coverage of governance and risk. "These are key additions, especially risk," said Larry Goldsmith, project manager for the portfolio standard update. "At the portfolio level there are different risks involved, many of which are external, such as shareholder value. By taking on a given project within the portfolio, you could introduce the company to unnecessary risk."
This standard's coverage area is significant for all project managers in part because of its role in advancing the profession's career path from project to program to portfolio management. "There needed to be a level set between the four standards to make them more integrated instead of interfaced," he says. "This is something we definitely accomplished."