Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)

PMI, the Project Management Institute was founded in 1969 by a group of 5 people and has expanded over the years to the point where it is now accepted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standards developer. It is a membership organization and considers itself to be the professional project manager’s organization.

The PMBOK is an attempt to establish a set of standards for Project Management. PMBOK has been accepted by ANSI as a standard for Project Management and as such, you will often hear it referred to by people working in the field.

The PMBOK breaks the process into 5 Process Mgmt Groups:

• Initiating - the first process which gets everything started. It includes everything needed to get a project started. Project Goals, Scope, as well as the vision of the end point all fit in here.
• Planning - here we refine and determine how it’s going to get done. The major effort here is the Work Breakdown Structure or WBS.
• Controlling - controlling and executing fit together in the VPIC model. Under controlling, we want to put everything associated with ensuring that the project is being done right and that we’re taking corrective action when something goes wrong.
• Executing - here’s where we get the resources and get to work
• Closing - closing involves evaluating and learning from what we did. It SHOULD also include a party to say thank you to everyone who worked so hard to finish

These are roughly similar to our VPIC model.

The PMBOK goes on to define 9 knowledge areas that we need to know to be successful

• Integration
• Cost
• Communications
• Scope
• Quality
• Risk
• Time
• Human Resources
• Procurement

We’ll come back to this over time as we go deeper into project management and what you have to know about it.

An important point to make here is that if you hire a professional project manager, particularly one who is certified as a PMP (Project Management Professional, a PMI certification), they’ll probably apply the notions in the PMBOK to running the project. Do you need to understand the PMBOK to understand project management? No … but you need to be familiar with the concepts so you can understand what you’re being told.

Categories: Project Management