What’s new in the PMBoK 7th edition? — Part 2

In the first part of this article, we discussed how the PMI gave more importance to the standard and its transformation from the processes based approach into the principles based approach.

in this article we will provide more detail about the new features included in the body of knowledge and the main changes made between the 6th and the 7th edition of the PMBoK guide.

What’s coming with the 7th edition?

As we said in the previous article, the PMBoK guide we talk about 2 separate documents, in the PMBoK guide we have the Standard for Project Management and the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge.

The current version of the PMBoK guide is based on processes and knowledge areas and this configuration let people think that the PMBoK guide prefers the predictive approach.

The 7th edition honors the professionals to choose which approach works best for their projects at hands. it builds on the vision of the standard with its core principles and focuses on project’s performance domains tailoring the approaches and practices to the unique needs of the project and models methods and artefacts from which to select as needed.

The how to in practice options are dynamic and growing, the new digital platform named PMIstandards+ will contain a growing body of knowledge around models and methods for project management for value delivery. This digital plateforme will contain downloadable tools and templates, video, case studies …etc.

What’s new in the body of knowledge?

The 7th edition is structured around performance domains instead of knowledge areas and ITTOs but before going so far let’s first introduce what a domain is.

A domain is a field of action, thought or influence (or simply an area of focus). and project performance domains represent a broad area of focus for project delivery, and they are focused on outcomes not outputs, in other words we become more interested in what we want to achieve instead of the means with what we will achieve since the means can change depending on the project’s configurations.

they overlap, interact and are interdependent and they occur throughout the project regardless of how value is delivered (frequently, periodically, at the end…)

The 7th edition provides 8 performance domains which are listed as following:

• Team
• Stakeholders
• Life cycle
• Planning
• Navigating Uncertainty & Ambiguity
• Delivery
• Performance
• Project work

Each domain in the book will start with a domain definition and the desired outcomes, and each performance domain will include 3 sections: Key definitions, Interaction with other performance domains and checking results.

This new presentation doesn’t mean that the content of the old version of the PMBoK guide is no more relevant, absolutely not, but the new edition contains almost the same content but represented in a more realistic way.

The performance domains won’t contain processes or ITTOs since they will be covered in the MMA sections (Models, Methods and Artifacts) while the content of the performance domains will contain the high level of basics around topics.

What’s more in the body of knowledge?

The rest of the guide will contain some other sections like tailoring which provides a framework and key questions to help project teams tailor the delivery approach.

The MMA sections (Models, Methods and Artifacts) as mentioned before is an abbreviated and high-level information to help build a tailored project delivery toolkit.

• Models represent a thinking strategy to explain a process, framework or phenomenon. (ex: Situational leadership, motivation, change, complexity, team development…etc)
• Methods are the means for achieving an outcome result or project deliverable (ex: Data Gathering and Analysis, Estimating, Meeting and events ..etc).
• Artefacts are templates, documents, outputs of project deliverables (ex: Strategy artifacts, plans, logs and registers, baselines, reports…etc).

How it all fits together

The overall objective of the standard and the guide is to give Project managers and practitioners guidance for delivering project outcomes. Neither the standard or the guide are prescribed on how to manage a project. approach aims to provide insight into what must be taken into consideration using the appropriate mindset and system of the project.

This image provides an overview about how all elements discussed previously fit together:

The 12 principles of the standard guide the behaviour of project participants, this is why they are on the top of the chart influencing the whole performance domains.

Methods and models are used as inputs for the project performance domains after being adapted and tailored to the project context, to provide on the right hand side the necessary deliverables and artifacts and all these elements are working together inside the internal environment to provide a value delivery. but the most important is how all these components intersect and connect to provide the delivery at the end of their interaction… and this is what PMI has expected to detail in its new PMBoK Edition.

As we said before, all the elements discussed in this article are still under development and they aren’t complete yet, but this is the result that the PMBoK developpement has achieved after several months of work.

the 7th edition is not about invalidating anything that preceded, but it is attending to expand outcome from previous editions.