The methodologies of project management have gotten more complex — so much so that the Project Management Institute® is including a second book with its latest edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge. The sixth edition of the PMBOK® Guide ships with the Agile Practice Guide, a book co-produced with the Agile Alliance, an organization that serves the Agile software community. In addition, approaches to agile-based project management surface as a topic in the PMBOK.
The additions come just in the nick of time. PMI’s 2017 Pulse of the Profession®, released earlier this year, found that seven in 10 organizations (71 percent) are using agile approaches more often than in the past. According to that survey, the use of agile approaches was also picked up as one of the reasons more projects are meeting original business goals, including being finished in budget.
“Organizations are competing under increasingly varied market conditions and the need to master a full range of project delivery approaches is essential,” said PMI President and CEO Mark Langley, in a press release. “As organizations strive to be more nimble and respond faster, they recognize there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to delivering successful projects. We are excited — as the leading voice for the project management profession — to bring a holistic approach to the forefront that will enable professional project managers to use the best method regardless of the project.”
Other changes in the latest edition of the PMBOK include coverage of the role of the project manager; the addition of a section on “managing knowledge,” such as lessons learned and how to spread it out in the organization; and tweaks to terms, such as a switch from “project time management” to “project schedule management” and “project human resources management” to “project resource management.”
The price of the latest PMBOK Guide is $99 for non-members and $49.50 for members.
