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In the late 1960s, several project management professionals from the con-struction and pharmaceutical industries believed that project management had moved beyond being simply a job or an occupation.2 They undertook the task of defining professional project management and created a profes-sional association to put the elements of professional support in place. They called it the Project Management Institute (PMI). They expected as many
4 The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Project Management Course
as a thousand members someday, and at first they ran initial operations out of one of the member’s dining room in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. These visionary leaders considered project management to be an international profession; early members were from not only the United States but also from Canada, South Africa, Europe, and Australia. By the mid-1970s, PMI chapters had been formed in five countries, and discussions of profession-al standards were under way at the association’s 1976 annual meeting in Montreal, Canada. By 1983, the discussions included ethics, standards, and accreditation. College programs were developed (see Chapters 12 and 13), a formal examination was created, and by 1984, professionals began to be designated as project management professionals (PMPs).
Definition of Project Management Standards
The creation of a professional association allowed hundreds of professionals from the field of project management to collaborate in developing an accept-able definition of what project management means. The original founders of the Project Management Institute, together with colleagues from business, govern-ment, and academia, assembled the professional writings on project manage-ment into a document called the “Project Management Body of Knowledge.” It started by focusing on the project itself, but by 1986, a framework was added to incorporate the relationship between the project and its external environment and between project management and general management.
Almost 10 years later, the standards committee published a new ver-sion of the document describing the processes used to manage projects, aligning it with the common knowledge and practices across industries, adding knowledge areas, and reducing the original document’s construction emphasis. More than 10,000 people in almost 40 countries received the document for review, and the “standard” truly began to proliferate around the world. There was common agreement that project management involves balancing competing demands among:
■ Scope, time, cost, risk, and quality
■ Stakeholders with differing needs, identified requirements, and expectations
A project was defined as distinct from operations in that operations are ongoing and repetitive, whereas projects are temporary and unique. Further, it clarified terms: “Temporary means that every project has a definite begin-ning and a definite end. Unique means that the product or service is differ-ent in some distinguishing way from all similar products or services.”3
An Evolving Professional Standard
The purpose of PMI’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide®) was to identify and describe that subset of
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the project management body of knowledge that is generally accepted, or “applicable to most projects most of the time.” Because so many profes-sionals contributed to the definitions and processes, and given its prolifer-ation around the world, the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge was becoming a de facto professional standard. While everyone seemed to agree, however, that the environment in which a project operates is important, they could not agree on what it should consist of. Different levels of organizational project management maturity across industries pre-vented building a consensus on the organizational context for project man-agement. For this reason, parts of the original “Project Management Body of Knowledge” (1986) that related to organizational responsibilities were left out of the published standard. It was 10 years before those concepts were accepted broadly enough that the scope could be extended to include programs and portfolios as organizational contexts for housing and strate-gically managing multiple projects within a single organization.
Projects are now linked explicitly to achieving strategic objectives, and organizational planning is considered part of the human resources management function. Processes and process groups are also now more fully defined.4 Some work was done in various countries around the world on professional compe-tencies and credentialing, but these cannot yet be defined as a “standard” because the business context differs so much from one country to the next.5 As the profession advances, these areas also may merge into one common defini-tion, providing significant benefits to organizations that operate globally.
A New Core Competency for Organizations
Awareness grew that project management, far from being an adjunct activ-ity associated with nonstandard production, actually was the means by which organizations implemented their strategic objectives. The consensus also grew that project management has become part of the core competen-cy of organizations. The definition captured in the 2000 Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge reflects this growing awareness:
Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and tech-niques to project activities to meet project requirements. Project management is accomplished through the use of the processes such as: initiating, plan-ning, executing, controlling, and closing. The project team manages the work of the projects, and the work typically involves:
■ Competing demands for: scope, time, cost, risk, and quality.
■ Stakeholders with differing needs and expectations.
■ Identified requirements.6
This change reflected a shift from seeing project management as a pro-fession to seeing project management as an organizational function with
6 The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Project Management Course
defined processes addressing both the needs and the expectations of people with a stake in the project’s outcome, as well as the functional requirements of the product or service to be produced. It also set as a standard the under-standing that the organization has explicit responsibility for the success of its projects. An organization’s management is responsible not only for estab-lishing an environment that allows and enables project success but also for approving and authorizing the requirements that the project is to meet.
The shift to an organizational context meant that the project manager was no longer an independent practitioner within the organization, making projects successful despite contrary forces. He now had a defined job title, function, and place on the organizational chart. Formalizing the occupation into jobs and career tracks creates a space in which the professional can operate legitimately
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