Project Management Institute

Project Management Institute (PMI)

(Surprised there's nothing here.)

I've recently come under a few managers who have very high opinions of PMI and PMBOK. Here are a few things I've heard from them that seem to be coming from PMBOK:

The utility of a programmer is a function of years of experience in the domain. (Sometimes accompanied by a spiel about the apprentice-journeyman-artisan hierarchy in stone-cutting for cathedrals.)
Auto mechanics can check a small guidebook to estimate the time necessary for most tasks, so software project managers ought to be able to do the same thing.
The ObjectManagementGroup is going to come up with a single schema for all common data - say, companies, their clients and accounts, etc. Once this is adopted, it will no longer be necessary to come up with schemas for these things; we'll just use this universal schema for it.

This all seems quite wrong to me for various reasons, but it would be nice if they would at least give me a little bit of information about why they think this is the way things are.

Anyway, I'm not certain that this is all a function of ProjectManagementInstitute or ProjectManagementBodyOfKnowledge?. I'd love to hear what someone a lot more knowledgeable (than me) would have to say about PMI. Obviously, I'm skeptical of them and probably a bit biased. :) RefactorMyYakkingIfNecessary?, I guess. -- JesseMillikan

The above points do not come from PMBOK. The only one close is the second point, one of many possible estimation techniques is to have a data set of past experience on similar jobs. There is no implication that software estimation should be done like automobile repair and PMBOK does not go to that level of detail. I recall nothing in PMBOK that even remotely sounds like points one and three. --WayneMack

I hear from a practitioner that more and more ProjectManagement jobs require some kind of PMI certification. Supposedly, certification is tied to an assessment process that is linked to on-the-job application of PM skills.

PMP Certification requires 1) taking a PMI certified course, 2) passing a PMP certification exam at a testing center, and 3) submitting documentation show past experience in project management. Retaining PMP certification requires earning a certain amount of PMI credits every three years. Credits are earned via work experience, attending PMI club meetings, writing project managment articles, and taking courses from PMI credentialled vendors.

CategoryProjectManagement