Updating the Project Management Bodies of Knowledge

Abstract

Project management bodies of knowledge (BOKs) have been published by professional project management associations now for 10 to 15 years. They are enormously influential. Not only do they provide standards against which the associations' certification programs are run, they are used by many practitioners and companies as best practice guides to what the discipline comprises. There are two or three different BOKs. This paper reviews the status of BOKs and reports research on what topics should be included in the BOK (1) conducted at the Center of Research in the Management of Projects (CRMP) using data from 117 companies and (2) through ongoing work on a Global framework sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and others. It concludes that, while a perfect BOK is a chimera, it is important to agree on the elements that should be in the profession's BOK, and that the current initiatives are timely and should be given further support. The profession's BOKs have a particularly interesting relation to emerging work on project management competencies.