Is a standard a best practice?
I spent the last week at a Project Management Institute (PMI) standards meeting where I serve on the OPM3 second edition standards team. There was a very interesting conversation that took place over the weekend regarding whether PMI standards should be considered best practices. The answer in general is no. A standard is considered to be a generally accepted good practice. In an emerging discipline, it is likely that there are best practices not in general use yet - so they won’t be part of the standard. This introduces two interesting questions. Are standards worth pursuing and what role does PMI play in thought leadership around Project Management?
First, standards are good practices. If you aren’t up to the level of the standard yet and project management is important to you, you should be working to achieve the standard. Just like you can’t learn advanced financial analysis until you understand adding and subtracting, if you don’t understand or aren’t can’t achieve even the standard, you probably aren’t very good at project management. I just hope that your business isn’t dependent on being able to implement projects to achieve their strategic or operating goals. Most of the project management disasters I’ve been involved in have involved people trying to skip the basics to jump to an approach that involved implementing some new practice. The Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) helps you figure out where you stand relative to these standards and helps you develop a roadmap so you can work on improving your ability to effectively perform projects. At the end of the day, a lot of PM is still blocking and tackling, you just can’t get past it.
Secondly, PMI has people on staff and thousands of active volunteers that probably spend to much of their time thinking about project management. There is a full time research staff looking into project management and exploring best practices. I believe I heard that there were 50 research papers published by PMI last year (2006). So, while the standard doesn’t reflect emerging best practices there are conferences and local chapters that explore and promote advanced thoughts about project management. As I just experienced this weekend, if you want to sit around and discuss the merits of emergins best practices in project management there isn’t a much better community than PMI.