The PMBOK® Guide – Sixth Edition (in English) will be available from 6 September.

What is PMBOK Guide? PMBOK Guide stands for A Guide to the Project Management Body Of Knowledge.

PMBOK guide is a well-known global standard for the project management profession. PMBOK guide is a formal document that describes established norms, methods, processes and practices for the project management industry. It helps project managers with the fundamental practices needed to achieve organizational results and excellence in project management.

PMBOK guide provides guidelines for managing individual projects. It provides and promotes a common vocabulary among project management practitioners. A common vocabulary is a necessary element for any professional discipline and it becomes easier to communicate within the project management team.

PMBOK Guide is currently in its Fifth Edition, which was released some time in 2013. It gets updated every four to five years. So, now the updated Sixth Edition is being released on 6 September 2017.

PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition: What you should know?

In this article, I am just providing a snap shot of the changes from PMBOK Guide Fifth Edition to PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition.

1. A new section on “The role of the Project Manager” – gives advice to project managers on how they should lead the projects effectively
2. A new process added to Project Integration Management called “Manage Project Knowledge” – managing all the project knowledge including lessons learned
3. Project Scope Management now touches on the relationship between the Project Manager and the Business Analyst
4. Project Time Management is renamed as Project Schedule Management; Estimate Activity Resources process is moved from Project Time Management to Project Resource Management
5. No major changes in Project Cost Management
6. Project Quality Management: “Manage quality” replaces the process “Perform Quality Assurance”
7. Project Human Resource Management is renamed as Project Resource Management; in line with this, the process “Plan Human Resource Management” is also renamed as “Plan Resource Management”. A new process called “Control Resources” is added to the Project Resource Management
8. Project Communications  Management: “Control Communications” process is renamed as “Monitor Communications”
9. Project Risk Management: A new process called “Implement Risk Responses” is added; a new risk response called “Escalate” is included
10. Project Procurement Management: “Close procurements” process is removed
11. Project Stakeholder Management: “Plan stakeholder management” is renamed as “Plan stakeholder engagement”; “Control stakeholder engagement” is renamed as “Monitor stakeholder engagement”
12. Four new sections introduced in each knowledge area
    • Key Concepts
    • Trends and Emerging Practices
    • Tailoring Considerations
    • Considerations for Agile/Adaptive Environments

Conclusion

We will see the official PMBOK sixth edition on 6 September. If I find any changes, which were not noted earlier, I will update this article accordingly.

I believe there are some good changes. Particularly, the changes made to Project Human Resource Management is welcome. It really reflects other resources that are involved in major complex projects.

However, some changes are again introducing some inconsistency. For example, PMBOK Fifth edition standardized the processes of Monitor and Controlling process group to start with “Control” verb. Now, there are some processes that are being “Control”led and some are being “Monitor”ed. I need to read the final version to exactly understand why they have differentiated these two.

What is your opinion on the changes in the upcoming PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition? Share your views in the comment section below.