PMBOK Sixth Edition Exposure Draft

As you may know, the current Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is the Fifth Edition. PMI has recently put an Exposure Draft of the Sixth Edition on their site for public comment. I went through the foundational information that is currently up there. And while they claim to be making more nods in the direction of Agile, it is still fundamentally a waterfall-based book.

The PMBOK still has Ten Knowledge Areas but appears to have gone from 47 to 50 processes. A quick read-through shows no real fundamental changes other than things like a team charter and more attention to resource management. If there is going to be more Agile information in the book proper that’s fine. But I doubt they see this as an Agile book because with its process intensive nature and continued reliance on documentation, it seems to me to be the antithesis of Agile.

They are doing this review in two stages and I will here quote PMI’s site: (you’ll find this note, an FAQ and a link to the draft itself, here.

“If you’ve participated in previous PMBOK^® Guide exposure drafts, you’ll notice that our process has changed. The Guide will be open for public comment in two stages.

• The Standard for Project Management—which contains the foundational knowledge behind the PMBOK^® Guide—will be open for full consensus review. This stage will run from 7 March 2016 to 6 April 2016. In a full consensus review, each comment is adjudicated by a committee of PMI volunteers who respond to each comment individually. If you don’t agree with their decision, you may file an appeal.
• The second stage will be a limited consensus review, which means thePMBOK^® Guide committee will review all comments to ensure we are reflecting good practices used on most projects most of the time. The committee, however, will not provide a formal response, nor will these comments be eligible for appeal.

We made this change in order to streamline the process to introduce the latest edition of the PMBOK^® Guide sooner, and to manage the workload for the volunteers dedicated to updating this essential resource for project managers worldwide.”