An Editorial Observation
From time to time we take the Project Management Institute ("PMI®") to task for the more obvious anomalies in its Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (April 2001 Editorial: "Standards for Very Large Projects" and November 2001 Editorial: "On Processes and Phases".) Now rumor has it that work has started on an update to be published in 2005. Like it or not, the shear weight of the US economy has enabled the Guide (known as "PMBOK®") to become the defacto standard for project management in many parts of the world. The current document unquestionably has many inconsistencies and dubious advice for neophyte project management practitioners, so now is the time to examine its contents seriously and consider how it can be improved.
We suggest one major area for improvement is in expanding the effective limit of the present document's scope. Project management is about much more than just managing one project. It should also be about the environment in which the projects are generated, how they come into being and on what priority basis. That includes the whole business of project portfolio management, or program management, and advice to senior management on how best to set the stage for successful accomplishment. We call that managing the "Front End". By the same token, it should also include more detail on how to launch the resulting product into the "Care, Custody and Control" of the customer. We submit this part is just as vital for ensuring that the product is not only successful but is perceived to be successful. We call this managing the "Back End". Only then can the project manager sit back satisfied that his or her project is a truly successful one.
What we have in the current PMBOK® is a collection of twelve chapters on a variety of subjects in no apparent order and little connection to one another. Miller in his classic psychology paper has suggested that the average person can only handle about seven topics, plus or minus two, at any given level. (See "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information" by George A. Miller, 1956, Harvard University - first published in Psychology Review, 63, 81-97 Clearly this is a serious shortcoming and to add more chapters on more topics without apparent structure could only make matters worse. Considering that the work breakdown structure is such an important tool in project management, a WBS would be an obvious choice - although not the only one.
In contrast to PMI®, the Association for Project Management has adopted an intuitively structured subject grouping proposed by Dr. Peter Morris, CRMP-UMIST, UK. Wideman has proposed a more encompassing six level structure. This spans from the Global Competitive Environment down to the Technique level that is more in tune with the current US model. (Issacon #1002, http://www.maxwideman.com, explains the structure, its significance and the content at each level.) A structure is needed to help practitioners understand where everything fits - and researchers to observe where knowledge is missing.
For example, a significant area of interest to a "global" operation is the matter of culture, not just as a sub-topic, but as an overriding premise. You just cannot run projects the same way in, say, Germany, Russia, the Scandinavian countries or Asian countries. The people in those countries simply have different cultural norms, behave and react differently to different organizational structures, and have different levels of risk acceptance. In other words, one (read US) size does not fit all.
We must sincerely hope that this time around much more practical input will be entertained from practitioners-in-the-trenches Also, one hopes, the input will be unfettered by constrictive copyright impositions on public knowledge, and preconceived notions of what is best for the treasury rather than what is best for the project management discipline at large.