Emerging standards for project management

The current trend in project management is a rapid consolidation on a few global standards, and a major growth in professionalization of project management. As part of this trend, one of the main emerging world standards is the Project Management Institute's approach, known as the Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK Guide . The PMBOK Guide is also the US national standard (ANSI) for project management. This edition of the book is aligned to the PMBOK Guide. We will also refer to three other standards, which although not nearly as widespread as PMBOK, have some interesting features. These are PRINCE2, the ISO standard for project management, and the APM approach. PRINCE2 has evolved to meet the specific needs of UK government projects, and is especially useful for generating the bureaucracy that is often a requirement of the public sector's duty of accountability. The APM is rooted in the European tradition of industrial management, and offers some useful contrasts to the PMBOK, which is more rooted in the efficient world of US global corporations and investment banks. A recent innovation in project management is the critical chain method^[5]. Appendix A describes that approach to project management and its rationale. It is not fundamentally different from the current mainstream methodologies, but it has some radical innovations in how risk and contingency are managed and is worth knowing about once you have mastered the basics of project management.

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