What woiect

Project management

I -I- - -

Organisation & people

need to know

- Systems management

- Programme management

- Project management - Communication

- Project life cycle - Leadership

- Project environment - Delegation

- Project strategy

- Project appraisal

- Project success/failure criteria

- Integration - Management development

- Systems 8, procedures

- Close out

- Post-project appraisal

- Organisation design

- Control & co-ordination

- Team building

- Conflict management

- Negotiation

Project management is clearly important. But on what specific knowledge and expertise does it depend?

New research provides the first empirically based answers, reports Peter Morris

- Work definition

- Planning

- Scheduling

- Estimating

- Cost control

- Performance measurement

- Risk management

- Value management

- Change control

- Mobilisation

roject management is increasingly recognised as an important discip- P line, not least in software, new

product development, systems integrat- ion and other electrical engineering projects. Businesses have long recognised the importance of managing projects so that they are delivered on time, in budget and to technical specification. Increas- ingly they are also recognising the role that project management can play in delivering projects quicker and for better value.

Yet project management is an elusive discipline. What does it really encom- pass? Is it simply project control - the collection of planning and monitoring techniques which many thmk of as cen- tral to the discipline - coupled perhaps with insights into teamwork, leadership and communications? Or is it more

- Operational/technicaI management

- Marketing & sales

- Finance

- Information technology

- Law

- Procurement

- Quality

- Safety

- Industrial relations

soplusticated, including the manage- ment of techrucal and commercial mat- ters? Does it cover managing the defin- ition of what the project is to achieve (hont-end definition) or is it just confined to management of project implementat- ion? And if so, when does implement- ation begin?

Bodies of knowledge Since the mid-l980s, project manage-

ment societies around the world have been addressing these questions head-on through various attempts to define pro- ject management ‘bodies of knowledge’, largely to support the various program- mes of examinations and certification they have begun to run. In the mid 1980s, PMI, the US-based Project Management Institute, developed first a PM body of knowledge and then its PMP qualific-

ation. The UK-based Association for Project Management (APM) introduced its body of knowledge (BOK) in the early 1990s. Tlus now forms the base of both its CPM and APMP qualification. The aim of both BoKs is to define what a project management professional ought to be knowledgeable in, and through this, to provide a professional qualification in the dwiphe .

But why are there at least two quite different versions of the BOK - the PMI’s and APMs? Answer: because they reflect different views of the discipline. Trad- itionally project management has been seen to be largely about completing a task ‘on time, in budget, to scope’. This reflects the task accomplishmenthnp- lementation orientation of project man- agement, and is still very much the basis of PMI’s BOK. Yet many practitioners and

.

~-

1 The four areas of the APM’s current BOK

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Table 1: Strongly supported topics identified in CRMP survey - - Topic Percentage of respondents indicating support

Loadership, legal awareness, procurement 100 Safety, health and environment 99 Life cycles 98 Purchasing 96 Risk managerent 95 Fi7ancial management 94

Industrial relations and on scheduling 93 The business case, project organisation,

testing commissioning and hand-over 89 Project context 87 Programme management 86 Quality management and teamwork 84 Prqect management plan 81 Pcst-project evaluation review 80 Contract planning and administration,

79 Monitoring and control 78

77 75

and on-project management as a general topic

Resources management and on project launch Configuration management and change control

academics believe this view fails to caphre sufficiently the scope of the real challrrnge of project management - a view3oint reflected in the APMs more broadly structured BOK.

What's it all about? PL t simply is project management a

matter of simply delivering projects 'on time, in budget, to scope', or should the primay concern be on delivering pro- jects ;uccessfully to the requirements of the project customer/sponsor? It has to be the latter. Defiling the scope, cost and time targets properly is half the battle; ensuring that the technical, commercial, business, environmental and other fact- ors are effectively aligned with organis- ationd and control issues is generally fundamental to ensuring an optimum outcome.

The importance of the wider remit - focusing on what delivering successful projects entails - was recopsed by the APM when it sought a BOK for its certif-

ication programme in the early 1990s. As a consequence, the APM decided that it would have to develop its own distinct BOK, rather than simply following the model of the PMI.

Updating the APM BOK The APMs current BOK comprises

four areas (Fig. 1): general topics; organis- ational issues; tools and techniques, and general management. The first and last areas cover some of these wider, more general and contextual matters. While the current APM model has worked well throughout the 1990s, it does contain a number of areas in need of revision. (Something which the PMI also recog- nises as applying to its own BOK.) As a consequence, work was initiated in mid 1997 by UMIST's Centre for Research in the Management of Projects (CRMP) to conduct a research p r o g r m e aimed at providmg empirical data to support an updating of the APMs BOK. The research lasted 14 months and was financed by

Table 2: Weakly supported topics identified in CRMP survey

Topic Percentage of respondents indicating support

Gosls, objectives and strategies Re'quirements management Integrative management Systems management Sulxess criteria Performance measurement, i.e. earned value Information management

28 32 33 36 42 44 46

the APM and industry The aim of the CRMP work was to:

identify the topics that project man- agement professionals consider need to be known and understood by anyone claiming to be competent in project management define what is meant by those topics at a generically useful level update the body of literature that supports these topic areas develop a BOK structure that best rep- resents the revised BOK.

The research findings were based on interviews and data collected in over 117 companies. The findings provide a fascin- ating insight into what practitioners and academics actually believe project man- agement professionals ought to know. As such, it is, in the view of C w a unique body of empirical evidence.

Findings Respondents showed considerable

agreement on most of the topics that they felt project management professionals ought to be knowledgeable about. A particularly important fmding was the endorsement of the need to expand the already broad range of topics in the APMs existing BOK. Detailed findings on strongly supported topics are shown in Table 1. There were, however, a num- ber of topics that were, in general, judged to be sigruficantly less important (Table 2). Some of these were a cause of surprise to the researchers and possibly reflect an under-appreciation of the relationship of project management with the business basis of the project. The 44% result for performance measurement is particular- ly surprising, as this is a topic generally judged to be of central importance by project management writers and experts.

Splitting the data by industry sectors revealed further interesting findings. Construction and information systems (IS) rated marketing and sales at 40%, and goals, objectives and strategies at only 20%. This may be a reflection simply of the jobshfe experience of those who res- ponded. It does, however, echo the reput- ation of those industries for concentrat- ing on implementation, and gwing less emphasis to relating the project to the

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I

General

Strategic 4.0 Project success criteria 5.0 Strategy/pro]ect management plan 6.0 Value management

7.0 Risk management 8.0 Quality management 9 0 Safety, health & environment

management, 35.0 Negotiation 36.0 Personnel

cost management management 14 0 Change control 15.0 Earned value

2 The CRMP BOK (Note: this figure indicates the BOK’S structure. In its entirety, the BOK comprises the structure plus definitions of the topics, together with appropriate references. Copies can be obtained from CRMP, tel +44 (0)161 200 4590; WWW.UMIST.~C.UK/CRMP)

customer’s real needs. Similarly IS rated requirements management only 22% - incredible considering the generally high rate of IS project failures. Information systems scores of only 29% for perform- ance measurement and 21% for facilities management (higher in all other indus- tries), are a further interesting comment on the IS sector.

CRMP BOK model Figure 2 shows the final version of the

CRMP BOK model, with the topics grouped into seven sections. The first section deals with a number of general and introductory items. The remaining six sections cover the strategc framework (including basic objectives), control issues, the definition of technical characteristics, commercial aspects related to implement- ation, the appropriate organisational struc- ture, and, finally issues to do with man- aging the people working on the project.

Areas of significant difference com- pared with previous versions of the APM BOK include tighter definition of success criteria; value management split from value engineering (because value man- agement is strategic and value enpeer - ing is basically technical/configuration/ engineering); a new emphasis on tech- nical with several new topics (design, production and hand-over, requirements management, technology management,

IEE REVIEW JULY 1999

modelling and testing); better description of procurement; better description of life cycle design and management, and an emphasis on organisational roles in addition to organisational structure.

The heart of the BOK is the text that describes each of the topics. Use of plain English has been the objective, both because th s is sensible and because this is what research showed people very much want. There was great discussion about whether there should be a ’technical’ heading. Indeed the debate about how much technical knowledge a project manager has to have is a very old one. It was finally included, not least because of the weight of research data that shows that technical matters and their management can be major sources of project failing to meet their planned requirement.

How valid are the findings? An important finding of the research

is that the breadth of topics is so strongly endorsed by the empirical data. Although this may comfort the origmal authors of the APM BOK, and indeed does fit with the research data on success and failure etc., there is an obvious word of caution. Since most of those providing data (though not all) were APM members, they would be biased towards accepting the APM BOK view of project maoage-

ment. A more interesting result would be to fmd what topics a cross section of pro- ject management professionals thought should be included. Work has begun on extending the research to incorporate this.

Conclusions Current BoKs have been notable first,

for the lack of empirical data upon which they are based, and secondly for the sign- ificant variation between the ’simpler’ PMI model and the broader APM/IPMA ones. The CRMP research found that all the companies contributing to the review supported the broader model, endorsing the importance of front-end, business, technical, and commercial issues in successful project management. For the present, however, the CRMP document is intended solely as a research BOK and is not meant to replace the existing APM BOK unless or until, the APM so decides.

0 IEE: 1999

Peter Morris is Professor of Project Management at the Centre for Research in the Management of Projects, Department of Civil & Structural Engineering, UMIST, PO Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD (le1 +44 (0)161 200 4591; fax +44 (OH61 200 9069; pwmoms@ netcomuk.co.uk). He is also Executive Director of INDECO, a leading projects-based consult- ancy.

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