Back when I was writing The Variance Threshold column, I wrote a piece entitled PMBOK, Schmimbok, (PMNetwork, March 2004) where I took exception with the inclusion of some areas of management under the PM umbrella that I thought shouldn’t be there (like Procurement, which, of course, is part of the general ledger). For Part II, I won’t review the PMBOK Guide’s® contents, but the style in which it’s written.
Now, I know that this document serves as the cornerstone of PMI’s overall codex, and is expected to stand up to considerable academic review scrutiny, which largely precludes any stylistic nuance in its presentation. I get that. Even so, I can’t get past this sense that it’s exceptionally clunky in its style. Before members of GTIM Nation can ask “’Clunky’ compared to what, exactly?”, I would like to present a couple of AI-generated samples that will more clearly show what I’m talking about.
I started by asking AskGPT to write a synopsis of Wuthering Heights as if it were written by the editorial committee that wrote the PMBOK Guide®, and well, here’s the first paragraph of what it produced:
This document summarizes the Wuthering Heights Relationship & Revenge Program (WHRRP), an informally initiated, multi-generational engagement spanning two adjacent estates: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
The program begins when Sponsor Mr. Earnshaw introduces an unvetted stakeholder, Heathcliff, into the Earnshaw household without impact analysis. This triggers sustained conflict with displaced stakeholder Hindley and creates a high-risk attachment between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, unmanaged by any governance or communication plan.[i]
To be both fair to the PMBOK Guide’s® editorial staff, and to provide a point of contrast, I also asked the AI bot for the opposite: to generate a synopsis of the PMBOK Guide® as if it was written by Emily Bronte. Less clunky, but more hilarious:
The world of projects is a bleak moor, where human schemes rise and sink beneath indifferent skies. This Guide, poor traveller, would arm you for that desolation. It speaks of initiations—how a project is first conceived in restless hearts and cold boardrooms; of planning, where hopes are measured, bound by scope, time, and cost, as if passion would submit to charts and baselines.
It tells of executing those designs through human hands, weak and wayward; of monitoring and controlling, as managers strive to chain change itself, to hold back chaos with reports and metrics, though change beats at every window like the wind. You will find herein five great movements—Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing—circling like seasons around ten grim domains: integration, scope, schedule, cost, quality, resources, communications, risk, procurement, stakeholder engagement.
Yet beneath the processes and tools, the Guide confesses that all projects are but fragile houses on shifting ground, raised by mortals against uncertainty. It urges discipline, documentation, and governance, knowing still that no plan is safe from human pride, neglect, or fate, and that every endeavor must one day close, leaving only lessons, records, and echoes.[ii]
Where things took a simultaneously amusing and terrifying turn was when I asked for another PMBOK Guide® synopsis as if it was written by yours truly and, well, I’ll let GTIM Nation be the judges based on these two extracts:
The PMBOK Guide is, essentially, a big, careful attempt to answer one question: “What do competent project managers generally do, most of the time, when they’re not making it up as they go along?”[iii]
And
- Planning: The bulk of the book lives here. Planning, as PMBOK sees it, is the act of deciding how to do the project well enough that surprises don’t kill you. You define scope, break work down, estimate schedule and cost, think about quality standards, how to staff, how to communicate, what to buy, what might go wrong, and who cares about what. Then you integrate all of that into a baseline plan that, inevitably, will be wrong—but hopefully not disastrously so.[iv]
Back to the writing style of the PMBOK Guide®. I was actually on the writing team that developed the original Earned Value Management Practice Standard for PMI®. At a meeting held for several practice standard teams, one presenter said that a litmus test for including an assertion was that “no one who is considered a subject matter expert would disagree with it.” This, of course, was impossible, since you could get fifty PMs in a room, and they would not agree on the color of an orange. But it did steer the verbiage of the contributors towards an approach as if they were writing expecting to be attacked for what they put down, which pulled the whole document into definitively clunky territory.
So, I understand why the Guide® was written in that particular style. I also know why I’ve never been invited to participate in writing the next edition of it.
[i] Retrieved from https://askgpt.app/chat/019f0166-a003-71ec-93b2-352e8c46e37a on June 23, 2026.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
