PMBOK®️ Guide 7th Edition - Principles and Standards - Part 2/3

In this second episode of the series about the new PMBOK^®️ Guide, Ricardo talks about the first part of the guide, which is the ANSI standard.

Ricardo explains that these principles are the DNA of the person who wants to manage projects and participate in a project team, regardless of your approach to managing and delivering your project.

The 12 principles embrace attitudes that support your work in the project management field, such as ethics, responsibility, respect, collaborative environment, stakeholder engagement, value delivery, tailoring, VUCA, internal and external factors to the project, and others.

Ricardo is also preparing his new video that will be available on his YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/rvvargas).

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Ricardo: Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast. Today I like to continue the series about the PMBOK Guide 7th Edition. Last week, I spoke about the main changes of the guide that the PDF you just downloaded or, the copy you just bought. It is not one document, but two documents that PMI Standard for Project Management and the PMBOK Guide. And today I want to cover the PMI Standard for Project Management, that is the ANSI standard and the underlying process on these parts of the guide, or are the 12 principles.

And first, let me explain, and let me read to you what PMI defines as a principle. The principle provides the foundation on how we should approach something in a profession. Some of them are also management principles while others are more related to the project management aspect. So the principles are, I would say something like the DNA of your behavior towards a project. And it's very important that you understand that the principles apply to all projects, with all sorts of deliverable methods.

So, if you were using the Spotify model or if you are using Kanban, or if you are using PRINCE2, it does not matter, you can benefit from understanding these 12 principles. Most of them, are human-centric principles. So let me go through the 12 of them, trying to make quick explanations on each of them.

And before I go to the first one, I just want to highlight one point: some of them are pretty obvious and I truly hope you learned them when you are at the age of five. So some of them are based on your character and based on the level of integrity you are educated. So it's not something that, oh, let me do a course to be respectful because I don't know if just a course we will solve your problem if you did not find a way of being respectful today, okay? So this is just my quick comment on that.

So let me go to the first one, be a diligent, respectful and caring steward, sorry for the way that I'm speaking because sometimes it's hard for me to say that. So what I'm telling here is that respect or the people care about your organization assets, care about your organization principles, care about their values, care about their money. So it's the ethics all the ethics, all of the professional responsibility that lies on this first principle.

The second one is to create a collaborative project team environment. Remember it's impossible for you to deliver your project alone. You need a team and need to create a way that the team is able to work together, and not in a competitive approach, it is very important that you create a team that one plus one is more than two.

The third one is the effectively engage with stakeholders. And the keyword here, it's not a stakeholder, but is the word engage. It's not managing, do not think that stakeholders are like a robot that you just program them to do what you want. They have different interests, different behaviors. So you need to bring them to your extended team. You need to engage them so they can support you and they can get committed to delivering what you aim to deliver.

And this drives me to the fourth principle that it is for me, I would say the key star and the north star of this guide is focused on value, as I said last week, that in the past, people were much more concerned about delivering on time on budget and not very much thinking about what people will do with the product of your project. Today is completely different, you need to focus on delivering value every single step. So when you are developing a product or developing a service or developing a new approach, you need to understand how I can keep my focus on delivering value, and not just delivering on time and on budget, but delivering what my organization expects me to deliver in terms of the value proposition for the organization. Every single project has a reason to exist, and this is the root of what we call outcomes. So don't think about the outputs anymore, but think about the way you can use outputs to reach out to the outcomes.

Number five, recognize the evaluate and respond to the system interaction. Simple, understand that you are a gear of a far more complex engine, that is your organization. That is sparked off a far more complex engine, that is the society or your marketplace or your country.

So you need to understand that your gear is not an isolated system. You have interactions and things that happen outside that affect your ability to deliver value. So you need to understand this. And I think this is quite easy to explain now with COVID-19 because with the pandemic we all saw how important is to have the system interactions. That pretty much a, a hundred percent of all projects globally were affected in some ways, by the pandemic.

Number six, demonstrate leadership behavior. This, I don't even need to explain more. So if you want to build a team, collaborate be respectful and deliver value, it is impossible to do that, if you are not developing and demonstrating leadership behavior.

Number seven, tailor based on context, it's not one size fits all. You don't take the PMBOK. You don't take the PRINCE2, or you don't take the Scrum method and just apply this. It's not like that. You need to tailor. Sometimes you will mix and your approach will be a mixed bag of everything. Every single tool, technique or software, whatever that we'll help you to deliver values. So you need to understand that there is no way with one single approach you will solve all the challenges of your approach in the environment.

Number eight build quality into a process and the deliverables. So this is just making sure that you are satisfying the requirements coming from your customer and your client.

Number nine, navigate complexity is just to understand the things are very complex in our becoming more and more complex. You need to understand that concept that I mentioned many times before about VUCA. You need to understand how this volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, all take place. And you need to navigate that, trying to identify and make decisions where you don't have perfect information that you don't know exactly how the outcome will be.

So it's a mixed and this number nine and drives me to number 10, optimize risk response because complexity brings risks. So you need to optimize your risk response and be proactive on that.

Number 11. And this is one of my favorite ones in this is the one, if I would tell my two daughters, I would say that embrace adaptability and resilience be adaptable and this, I would say, if you could show me in your CV adaptability, you receive for sure, I start in your CV. If I'm looking to hire someone to work on a project because adaptability is so crucial and it's not very easy to get so embrace, be adaptable to different circumstances. There is no way that the plan is written in stone anymore.

And last, but definitely not least. Enabled change to achieve the vision feature state. And the keyword here is not changing, like what I said in stake-holder the keyword was an engaging stakeholder. Now I'm talking about enabling change. Remember change is not something to avoid, it’s not something to control, it sometimes you need to enable a change to flourish your project, to deliver value from a different perspective.

So these are the 12, of course, I'm spending a little bit more than five minutes to explain that I plan to explain a little bit better in a video, but these are the 12 principles of the PMI Standard for Project Management.

One point final topic. Remember these apply to all types of projects regardless of the methodology, or you can apply these with PRINCE2, you can apply this using the IPMA competence by his line, you can apply these using Kanban, you can apply this using Scrum or Safe. It doesn't matter, okay?

Always remember that and see you next week for our final part of the series is about the PMBOK Guide. Take care.

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