I was interested to see the changes brought in with the new PMP Exam on 9th July. Now, I’m not a PMP person myself – the UK in general leans more towards PRINCE2 – but it is a global force, so changes there are likely to appear in most other places.
The PMP has three exam domains, with a different weighting each as how much of each of them will be in the exam. The first two, People and Process, have seen drops – from 42% to 33%, and from 50% to 41%, respectively.
This is to leave room for the Business Environment domain to more than triple its share from 8% to 26%, a really dramatic rise.
Now, obviously Process is still the biggest area – I mean, it’s project management, the process is important! It’s where huge amounts of benefit in actually getting the work done comes from.
Inevitably, AI has also raised its head, and the addition of sustainability seems worthwhile. But I think the changes elsewhere are informative.
Notably, the People section has also been rebalanced to include not just the internal team dynamics from the past, but also much more explicitly around engaging stakeholders, managing customer expectations, and planning communication more strategically.
At the same time, the dramatic increase in the Business Environment domain brings in judgement around project governance, compliance, risk, organisational change, and reacting to a changing external environment. The outcomes of a project are also raised in importance.
As the PMI says, “Practically, this means candidates are being asked to demonstrate not just execution skill, but business judgment: the ability to situate a project in a larger organizational and market context, and to make decisions accordingly”.
What this says to me is that the PMI is trying to reflect that changing role of project managers, and indeed the changing practitioners of project management, who may not have the title of “project manager”.
There seems to be a bit of a pincer movement in the real world, squeezing the dedicated project manager role. On the one hand, there is a push for the project manager to own the outcomes of the project, not just the implementation of it, taking on some of the responsibilities of a project executive / sponsor. At the same time, people who may have previously been at the executive level are rolling up their shirt sleeves, and getting involved in managing the project day to day.
You can see that in some of the changes being made in the UK public sector, with the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework not including project managers at all – there is a role for “Delivery Manager”, but this seems more limited than a traditional project manager role.
What do you think? Do the PMP changes make sense? Are we seeing the slow death of “Project Manager” as a specialised role, with those skills now be required more broadly across business?
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.