The 6th Edition of the Guide To The Project Management Body of Knowledge gives some new challenges over those that previous versions have presented. Course materials that are old versions spruced-up with a digital equivalent to a ‘lick-of-paint’ are going to create some avoidable challenges for both real use and for exam study.
The sources of challenge arise in a few areas
- First in importance IMHO (In My Humble Opion) for exam students is that the 6th Edition buries many of the exam level details. For example it list “Project Documents” as an input to 43 of 49 processes. Project Documents is itself a collection of 33 items that exam study needs to understand the flow of for the increasingly common “What next..”? or How would you avoid…?” type questions. Interpersonal and Team Skills, Organisational Process Assets, Expert judgment, Project Management Plan Updates are similar examples where you have to get into the details of Tools and techniques and outputs – and there are plenty of other examples I could have listed.
- The scope of the Project Manager’s job in the 6th Edition is hugely bigger than in previous editions – It didn’t take many words in the first few chapters to say it but the implications are profound. To say the PM should be involved in project justification and selection through to final product service or result implementation and benefits realisation extended the PM and team’s job by a lot! It is the right thing to say if we are to hook project performance into stakeholder value creation from projects but it has a lot of implications for the thinking in every aspect of the PMBoK-G’s use.
- Through the 6th Edition the PMI has reasserted a claim to be ‘all things project management’. The 6th Ed. says agile and all that new, young, disruptive stuff is just ‘a way’ to do part of the project (the control of “product development approaches”) so as a good PM you’ll know the alternative choices for product development and how to monitor and control irrespective of the development teams’ choices of life-cycle – just like you’ll know all the conflict resolution modes and a wide variety of procurement contract types.
Our course materials carefully encapsulate and cross-link the details through the 49 processes and the 105 elements of Expert Judgment, the 9 forms of data gathering etc.
We have extracted from our full course materials the core content as a reference aid – too terse and concentrated to be considered a study guide for primary first level input but super handy for chasing down details once your into the mature stages of your exam preparation when you are scouring the internet looking for more practice questions and your hoping the one you just got wrong is because its based on an old edition of the PMBoKG. Without a reference source that going to be really hard to determine.
Let us know where to send it and we’ll share the Ref-Aid with you.