As someone who has been a PMI member since 1999, I'm considering with some cynicism and amusement the impending release of the next edition of the PMBOK Guide.
While I do understand the need to evolve standards and practice guides over time, I question whether PMI would be better served by helping practitioners better cope with how things really are in their contexts rather than focusing rather exclusively on how things should be.
For example, wouldn't it be great if there was a practice guide which provided practical options for dealing with the most common issues facing PMs? This could include case studies from PMs who had successfully dealt with those issues as well as sufficient context to aid practitioners in figuring out how to proceed.
My impression is that PMI has been trying to find their market space in recent times. They have attempted to move more from the philosophical to the practical with limited success. Citizen Developer (low-code/no-code application development) was one such example that briefly had its own topic section and then faded away. PMI Infinity looks like another example of attempting to capitalize on the AI boom but the limited training data makes me believe that as a tool, it has limited practicability.
PMI may be a not-for-profit, but that doesn’t mean the senior stakeholders aren’t out for their own best interest. Labor union leaders for example typically have much higher incomes than the rank-and-file members they represent. I suspect the thought leaders at PMI are much like any other executive board, and largely motivated by taking credit for change, more than the ultimate value of the changes themselves. While that may sound cynical, it’s psychological and sociological given in the business world: WIIFM = What’s In It For Me?
Quite frankly it is much easier to wax philosophical from the mountaintop about how things should be, than to address the day-to-day reality of working through specific problems. The philosopher can always be right if you frame their opinions through the right lens and point to historical situations that fit the narrative. As George Bernard Shaw once quipped however, “If all economists were laid end-to-end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.” Practical advice is often far more difficult. The list of problems in the real world is endless, and the solutions either work or they don’t. I think PMI is finding that it is easier to provide guidance as the philosopher, than the practitioner. Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
PMBOK® Guide 8th Edition - Evolution, or Just Another Reinvention?
A few weeks ago, I reflected on how our profession is moving from governance to guidance, from control to clarity.
With the 8th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide about to go to press, that reflection feels more relevant than ever.
Over the past decade, PMI has shifted from prescriptive processes (6th) to principle-based thinking (7th), and now toward a hybrid structure that seeks to reconcile both.
Yet the deeper issue remains untouched.
Principles of management should evolve slowly, not at the pace of software releases. They are not trends; they are the ethical and systemic foundations of how humans create together.
What seems missing is not guidance or content, but cohesion - the invisible glue that connects human values, organizational dynamics, and technical practice into one coherent discipline.
True maturity isn’t about choosing between structure and philosophy.
It’s about reconnecting consciousness, context, and craft - so that management once again becomes an act of meaning, not compliance.
Because in the end, every method is temporary.
What endures is the clarity of purpose behind it.
Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Kiron,
the PMBoK Guide originally was meant to structure good practices in project management, used by most projects most of the time. This is exactly what you ask for: document practices that already worked and can be used as practice-based evidence, adapted to your own situation. It was characterized as non-prescriptive, yet used by many as template. PMBoK Guide ed 6 hailed by many was its culmination, and yet it became unpractical with 750 pages.
Now, moving the focus from processes to principles in ed 7 opened a new frontier, in theory and practice. In parallel, there is recent research on principles (Organizational, Portfolio, Program, and Project Principles: How to Build a Principle-based PPM Environment, 2023. AIPMO), a wide new box of worms, as principles are not rational and evidence-based like processes, but rather heuristic, shortcuts, and culture depended.
The benefits of a PMBoK Guide was for practitioers to learn and gain confidence, for projects to follow a template, which improved efficiency, and for organizations to establish standards, which made their portfolios transparent and better manageble.
