The Project Management Institute PMI is the premier standards and professional organization for project management. It works in collaboration with American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to develop and promote project management standards. Its certifications recognize knowledge and competency and the Project Management Professional (PMP ® ) certification is widely considered as the gold standard. PMI has been criticised for being slow to adapt to changes e.g. acknowledging that agile methods were being increasingly adopted in the tech industry as well as these being particularly suited to changing requirements and initiatives with uncertainties e.g. those in startups. However there’s not much generalized awareness in tech about standards beyond those related directly with tech.
So what exactly is a standard ?
A standard is a document established by consensus and approved by a recognized body, which provides rules and guidelines for common and repeated use. The recognized body could be ANSI or ISO and the standards development process involves consultations with subject matter experts (SMEs) as well as review and feedback from general public. ANSI is a member of ISO and its standards are voluntary, but can often become mandatory if adopted by government agencies for which projects are done. ISO standards are reviewed every 5 years.
It can be argued that unless you’re working with government agencies you may not need to follow these standards. Especially in tech / software, where a new javascript framework comes out every other week, a standard lifecycle which does a review every 5 years may seem too slow to become outdated. The project management body of knowledge PMBoK from PMI, which includes project management standards is only in its sixth edition. While agile methods has been increasingly used in tech industry and beyond over the last two decades, it’s only in 2017 that PMI brought out an Agile Practice Guide along with the PMBoK, in collaboration with Agile Alliance ®. Better late than never.
Project work varies from highly-repeatable and definable to that with high-uncertainty. Defined problems with known solutions need focus on correct execution. Those where solutions are not known, or even problems are not known (e.g. startups) need exploratory, experimental and iterative approaches. Projects with defined work / fixed requirements / low uncertainty where managing cost is the main goal perform well with predictive / plan-driven approaches. This is what has been elaborated in the PMBoK with activity sequencing and network diagrams, because the focus was traditional construction / manufacturing / government projects. In projects where requirements and dynamic, change and uncertainty is high and the goal is to maximize value for the customer with improved collaboration, agile life cycle approaches are best-fit.
The new Agile practice guide does a good job of explaining agile concepts. It makes a distinction between iteration-based agile (scrum) and flow-based agile (kanban). There’s acknowledgement that agile frameworks have not defined roles beyond the development team (including the product owner and agile coach/scrum master). Key responsibilities of a project manager with regards to integration management is delegated to a large extent with agile methods, to the team. In agile projects, the project manager’s focus is on building a collaborative decision-making environment, to ensure the team is able to respond to changes. The emphasis shifts from “managing coordination” to “facilitating coordination”, and requires “servant leadership” instead of “command-and-control”.
PMI itself is going through a digital transformation. Similar to ITIL which has been slow to update its standards following the rise of DevOps, at PMI too the updates on Agile were slow to arrive. Till today the PMBoK remains a locked, individually-issued PDF document of around 800 pages which includes both the standards as well as knowledge and practices (mostly plan-driven) on project management. It’s not available in a web-based version, neither is the standards section available without payment. Examined in the light of the rapid changes in tech (e.g. open-source, cloud computing and distributed version control systems like git), there’s a lot to be said about improving availability, lack of timely updates and improving on-line collaboration.
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