Project Profile Matters and Agile

One of my most often used statements in project management is "it depends", because it does.

How long should the project charter be? How many activities should I use? Who should I include as stakeholders on my project? These are all questions with answers that begin; "it all depends"

A construction project in Argentina, an IT project in New Delhi and a drug development project in Denver require very different execution approaches and differing knowledge, skills and abilities to successfully manage the project. A construction project in Argentina can vary significantly by size, by the complexity of the technology, by the tightness of the schedule, by the knowledge and expectations of the client. To understand the knowledge skill and abilities needed by the project manager and the project team, it is important to understand the profile of the project, even within the same industry.

The IT industry has developed a set of project execution tools, methods and techniques that apply to a project profile that is most common in the IT Industry. Agile is the label that has emerged to describe this set of methods, tools and techniques. (more on Agile in later blogs)

Profiling project has been an interest of mine for over 20 years. I presented in first draft of a profiling method in the mid 1990s. I continue to develop my thought and will be publishing more later.

The Project Management Institute has a long and varied approach to profiling projects. The Project Management Institute Standards Committee chartered a Taxonomy Project with Gregory D. Githens as project manager (PMI, 1999). I served on this team and we provided a framework for classifying projects for the purpose of understanding and developing better methods of managing projects. The committee presumed that a greater understanding of projects was a necessary for developing improved project management approaches. The committee explored several different approaches to understand how projects are similar, and develop a method for classifying projects. Before our work was published things changed at PMI. During a reorganization of the Project Management Institute, the PMI Standards Committee was dissolved and replaced with a Standards Program and the Taxonomy Project was abandoned.

Later the Project Management Institute chartered research to study project categorization systems within organizational contexts (Crawford, Hobbs & Turner, 2002). This research resulted in a model for practitioner organizations to analyze and design a project categorization system. Crawford et al. (2002) stated that an organization adopting one of these project categorization systems would do so to identify the project management practices best suited to each of the different types of projects. Crawford also recommended that the Project Management Institute, despite the potential arbitrariness of a standard for categorizing projects, charter a project for establishing standards for project categorization. I recommended that PMI include the work on Crawford et al in the 5th Edition of the PMBOK. This suggestions was deferred for later consideration.

To my knowledge, PMI has not followed up on this research.

I will talk about profiling projects during later blogs because the is my special area of interest within project management.

Best
Russ

Crawford, L., Hobbs, J. B., & Turner, R. J. (2005). Project categorization systems: Aligning capability with strategy for better business results.  Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

PMI 5th Edition of the PMBOK

The Project Management Institute released the 5th, latest edition of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge in January. I received mine in the mails on January 15th. It is a hefty 589 pages. For PMI Members, you can get a free download from the PMI Website.


I could not help but compare the 1996 edition with it's 176 pages. As best as I could tell, I was the only person listed who reviewed both of these documents for PMI. Back in the early 90's I was solicited to review the work of the committee and had several discussions with Standards Committee. In 1996 I drafted a definition of project management and worked on the quality section. Not much is left from my original work, although I still like my definition better.  This time around I responded to the open call to the membership to review the exposure draft. The process involved an automated form which was very easy to use and allow room to comment on everything, if you wanted.


I chose to select and focus on ten items. Four were accepted and changes made to the final publication. I think four were deferred to the next revision and two were rejected. Evidently, the committee worked on items deferred from the fourth edition and if things were not settled items were deferred to the 6th edition. I understand more items were deferred to the 6th edition than were settled by releasing the 5th.


As PMI goes deeper into the details of project management, I wonder if we are losing our consensus approach.  Although I accept the decision and logic of the committee, I think my suggestions that were rejected had value. I wonder how many others would disagree with the end product to some degree. If there is emerging disagreement among professional, is our standard losing value?