Zandhuis - ISO 21500: guidance on project management : a pocket guide

In this publication illustrations and texts have been reused with permission from British Standards Institute (BSI):

Permission to reproduce extracts from BS ISO 21500:2012 is granted by BSI. British Standards can be obtained in pdf or hard copy formats from the BSI online shop:

2012 BSI for ; Annex B Glossary

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Project management is one of the key skill sets demanded by organizations around the world. Some facts:

One-fifth of the worlds GDP, or more than $12 trillion, will be spent on projects each year in the decade 2010-2020.

In the coming years many skilled project management practitioners will be leaving the workforce due to retirement a trend which will have a major strategic impact for over 60% of the organizations worldwide.

Consequently there is a great demand for knowledgeable project managers.

The intention of this pocket guide is to provide you with a quick introduction to one of the latest developments in the project management profession: ISO 21500 Guidance on project management being the first really globally accepted standard on project management. This guide contains a brief and straightforward introduction and high level summary of ISO 21500, with tips for its practical application. It is therefore key knowledge for a project manager who is ready for the future.

It will enable and support you, your organization and all project stakeholders to speak one language in project environments, even cross-borders, with multiple nationalities and multiple organizations involved. It will explain ISO 21500, its background and its practical application.

In 2006 ISO recognized the organizational need for knowledgeable project managers and decided that organizations could benefit from some guidance in this area. An international team of over one hundred experts in project management worked for five years to develop a globally accepted guideline on project management. This development didnt start from scratch; instead it integrated the knowledge from reputable representatives in the project management profession from all over the world, like PMI and IPMA. All this work resulted in a rather slim document. However the impact of ISO 21500 on the project management profession is huge. Committing to ISO 21500 means that all of the stakeholders in project environments speak the same language and work with the same big picture in mind, thus improving communication. ISO 21500 is, therefore, a fundamental input when cooperating in projects and jointly striving for project success.

With ISO 21500 being the first guidance on project management that is accepted and recognized by most of the international organizations which represent and contribute to the project management profession, it will become the key reference for future developments in this profession. This fact is already confirmed by e.g. the latest (fifth) edition of PMIs PMBOK Guide (2013), which shares exactly the same structure with only slightly different names for some processes, and which overlaps with more than 95% of the processes mentioned in ISO 21500. Other globally applied standards, like IPMAs Competency Baseline 4.0 (due in Autumn 2014), already plan to follow the same direction.

Is it important for you to know? Well, nowadays every organization has projects, whether formally recognized as such or not. Projects are mostly aimed at achieving new organizational capabilities, for meeting new demands, driven by the increased pace of change in the organizations environment, or for realizing new opportunities. So it is more than likely that at some point in time during your professional career you will have a role to play in these projects. For that reason it is important for you to have some basic understanding of project management. No matter what your role in the project is, project manager, project sponsor, project team member: all stakeholders speaking the same language in projects is key to facilitating communication, and increasing the speed, quality and chances of project delivery.

We would also like to underline that all these projects represent large investments by organizations, as we have mentioned in the beginning. But moreover, think about the time and effort spent by scarce resources. For organizations it has become essential to deliver their projects successfully to ensure a sustainable future. That takes more than a skilled, experienced, knowledgeable and competent project manager. It requires basic project management knowledge from all project stakeholders and some well-defined processes, applied in practice, to facilitate real cooperation and ensure realizing the drive to make it happen. If this teamwork is based on a (well) defined, shared and well understood approach, it will increase the success rate of projects, delivering or even exceeding the expected benefits.

We encourage you, your project management community and project stakeholders collectively, to become familiar with ISO 21500, its concepts, subject groups (themes) and its processes, in order to increase successful project delivery!

May 2013,

Anton Zandhuis

Rommert Stellingwerf

The authors wish to thank Van Haren Publishing for their vision and the opportunity to write and publish this pocket guide.

We are grateful for the cooperation of BSI and their permission to use parts of the BS ISO 21500:2012 document.

We have been inspired by some of the analysis work of the ISO 21500 interest group especially for , where we compare ISO 21500 with other standards and methods. This interest group was initially formed in 2009 to review the usability of the forthcoming ISO 21500 guideline in the Netherlands, and is sponsored by IPMA-NL and PMI Netherlands Chapter. Given the enthusiasm of its members for the development of the project management profession, and the open discussions and sharing of ideas and insights, it is now continuing as ISO for projects in order to further contribute to the promotion and practical implementation of the ISO 21500 guideline, as well as to assess the application of the new ISO documents for program and portfolio management and for project governance, which are all under development at the time of writing.