What’s new in PMBoK 4th edition

Last February PMI published a draft version of PMBOK 4th edition. Everyone interested in project management could freely read this publication and put forward the suggestions. The final version of PMBOK standard will be published by this year’s end. What are the latest proposals of PMI?

At the first glance, you can see changes in the names of processes, all of them are now in verbs. Is that the only change?

Some processes have been rearranged, accordingly:

• Activity ‘Develop preliminary scope statement’ has been removed – probably because it has overlapped with ‘Scope definition’

• ‘Scope Planning’ has also disappeared – we can see the trend that showed in the third edition for the first time. In the third edition schedule and cost planning have been removed from planning process.  These changes may confuse people doing PMP exam. Activities related to scope, schedule and cost planning must be performed in any project, so questions about that are more than certain at the exam.

• “Procurement management” has shrunk from 6 to 4 processes. But scope is still the same and even more coherent. In the third edition processes seemed to me unnaturally designed, now that is much better.

Processes: Manage Project Team and Manage Stakeholders Expectations have been changed too. They have been moved from Monitor & Control to Execution process group. The PMBoK authors explain that people are not documents, so no one can „control” them.

In the new PMBoK some new processes have been introduced:

• Identify Stakeholders – As the output from this process we have – Project Stakeholders Register and Stakeholders Managing Strategy.

• Collect Requirements – not only requirements gathering but also managing and planning. The Collect Requirements process is one of those eagerly anticipated by IT Project Managers.

To be honest, the third version of PMBoK has already all the aforementioned processes, but nowadays they seem to become more important ( by taking into account results from surveys about the most common causes of project failures) and receive their own place in the new PMBoK edition.

Are there any more changes in PMBoK v.4? 

Yes. It leans forward Agile Methodologies and encourages us to use Rolling Wave Planning more often. The latest version also presents the brand new concept of Project Management Plan and the documents supporting them.

For the final version of PMBoK 4 we have to wait about half a year. We can see right away that changes wouldn’t be as revolutionary as it was with ITILv3, but the direction is very promising.

More interesting links can be found below.