PMBOK® Guide – Eighth Edition: What It Means for Enterprise PMOs

About this webinar

PMBOK® Guide – Eighth Edition brings practical process guidance back alongside the Seventh Edition's focus on principles and value.

Jesse Fewell, Gabrielė Bitinė and Michael Hannan join Stuart Easton to explain what changed, what practitioners told the writing team and what those changes mean for PMOs.

What you'll hear

• Why familiar process guidance returned. Jesse describes how the writing team worked from more than 48,000 data points and tried to bridge the value-led direction of the Seventh Edition with practitioners' demand for familiar process guidance.
• What changed in the definition of a project. Gabrielė discusses the change from “endeavor” to “initiative”, describing “initiative” as language people already use in organisations. She and Mike also question whether uniqueness belongs mainly in the output or in the context surrounding the work.
• Why success cannot stop at scope, schedule and cost. The panel treats this as a long-running shift rather than an Eighth Edition invention, using the Sydney Opera House and Boston's Big Dig to explore the difference between delivery performance and the value ultimately created.
• What the Eighth Edition means for PMOs. Gabrielė discusses the new PMO appendix and a role that goes beyond progress tracking, reporting and policy into strategy and value, while still being tailored to what the organisation needs from its PMO.
• Why portfolio management belongs in the conversation. Stuart makes the case that portfolio management is integral rather than optional because it sets the stage for the project work that follows. That raises the wider question of managing the portfolio as an ongoing strategic system.
• How to compare different kinds of value. Jesse groups value into money, mission and organisational mechanics or operational measures, while acknowledging that there is no universal index for comparing them. Mike adds that leaders' judgement about value has to be surfaced and harmonised, especially when ROI alone is not enough.
• A useful practice beyond the guide. Mike adds a practice he explicitly says is not in the Eighth Edition: define both the value an initiative is intended to create and a minimum acceptable threshold, below which the work should be stopped or rethought.
• How to use the Eighth Edition in practice. Jesse closes by stressing that PMBOK is a guide rather than a cookbook, suggesting discussion and lunch-and-learn sessions as practical ways for a project community to explore and apply it.