Webinar Attendees' Questions, Answered, Part 1: What about PMBOK7?

August 10, 2021 | by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

On July 27, we aired our most recent webinar, Project Management Maturity Meets the Agile Environment (click to view the recording), which was based on our recently-released book, The Project Management Maturity Model, Fourth Edition. As always, we'll respond to questions that we did not have time to answer during the event here on our blog. Today's question:

Q: PMBOK® 7 was released this month. Does that affect your maturity model in any way?

A: Yes ... and no. (This seems to be the answer to so many questions these days! Life is full of ambiguity and complexity. We must be living in the Uncertainty Domain!)

Let me answer the "no" portion of this first. The model measures an organization's capability maturity on a wide array of project management and portfolio management* processes. Many, but by no means all, of these were described in previous editions of the PMBOK® Guide. Experienced practitioners will appreciate that, while the new shift of focus and terminology in the Seventh Edition of the Guide is welcome, and in tune with the times, it by no means erases the need for project managers and organizations to be versed in things like scheduling, costing, resource allocation, and stakeholder engagement. The addition to our model of Agile/Adaptive components to each of the Knowledge Areas and Special Interest areas (the PMO, Management Oversight, and Professional Development) in our new edition updates the model to match, not PMI's standard, but the demands and needs of organizations struggling with agile transformation in a project-dependent marketplace.

Now for the "yes": I think we all need a better understanding of how the brand-new conception of project management described by the PMBOK® Guide, Seventh Edition jives with the project management practices we know and love. To that end, our SME Alan Fein--who was a key player on the team that updated the model in 2020--is now mapping the process descriptions in the model to the Eight Performance Domains. This will allow our consultants to produce reports for clients organized either by Knowledge Area, or by Domain, according to the type of insight into their capabilities that they are looking for.

I'll be interviewing Alan in a future blog post, to catch up with him on this important work. Stay tuned!

* ... and, by the way, for the attendee who asked why portfolio components were not included in the previous edition of the maturity model book ... they were! See Appendix B if you have your Third Edition handy. They are also included in the Fourth Edition, and have been updated with Agile/Adaptive components, as well as processes related to Organizational Change Management and Benefits Realization.

About the Author

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin is editor-in-chief for PM Solutions Research, and the author, co-author and editor of over twenty books on project management, including the 2007 PMI Literature Award winner, The AMA Handbook of Project Management, Second Edition.

View Posts by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

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