The changes are mainly in the area of readability, linkages to other PMI standards, and clarifying how the project documents work together. So the first couple of chapters are now the same as in the Program Management Standard and the Portfolio Management Standard of PMI. This also helps bring PMI’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3®) up to date.
There are also some striking philosophical changes which seem minor at first but are rather interesting to those of us who are ‘highly interested in the PM endeavor’ – otherwise known as PM geeks.
One of those striking changes was the elimination of any reference at all to “The Triple Constraint”, called by some the Iron Triangle. This is the principle that a project has to balance Time, Resources (Cost) and Scope. The question was always – what about risk and quality and requirements, where do those all fit in. So the PMI has put in words that simply say that a PM has to balance all of these aspects and no longer even refer to the Triple Constraint.
In terms of readability, all process names are now in verb-noun format. The concept of “project documents” was introduced, to distinguish the large set of documents and artifacts that arise in a project from the Project Management Plan, and to avoid the silly situation of the 3rd Edition in which the Project Management Plan was an input to processes which had as their output ….you guessed it…the Project Management Plan or a predecessor.
