Three things you’ll find in the new edition of the APM Body of Knowledge

The new, eighth edition of the APM Body of Knowledge (APM BoK) runs to some 350 pages and is described by its Managing Editor, Professor Mike Bourne, as “a compendium of the areas of knowledge that people running projects need to have.” Bourne, Professor of Business Performance at Cranfield University, says that a good deal has changed in the five years since the seventh edition of the APM BoK came out. This has required significant expansion to the scope of the work.

Here are three new focus areas you need to know about:

1. Artificial intelligence (AI)

“There is a chapter on AI in there now, because I think AI could be a huge benefit to projects. A lot of what you do [as a project manager] is pulling together disparate pieces of information in order to form a view, and AI really can help with that,” says Bourne.

The rise of AI, he argues, will also change the balance of skills required by project managers in the future. “AI will change some jobs. In lower-level jobs around project controls, the admin is going to come out, which is what AI should do.” At the more senior level, however, the challenge will be how to manage AI as well as people. Partly, that means helping overcome fears around the technology so that people work with it, rather than fight against it.

“No one wants to be working for a computer, but you do want the computer to help you,” he says. “We had a presentation by Amazon recently. What was interesting was that they were not using AI to answer customer questions directly, but to help the person who does by offering them suggestions.”

One must also be realistic about the limitations and foibles of AI, some of which are surprisingly human. There have already been instances from the legal profession where AI has created ‘fake law’, making up fictitious precedents, some of which have made it as far as the courtroom before being discovered.

Similar risks are likely to emerge within the project profession, he warns. “Is the data you are getting out of your AI system relevant, and do you really believe it? That’s really tricky. Project leaders are really going to have to keep their eyes on the ball.”

2. Systems thinking

There is also new material on systems thinking (a discipline that seeks to understand systems holistically, rather than by breaking them down into their component parts) to reflect the increasingly complicated and multi-disciplinary nature of many modern projects. “If you are trying to make sense of large, complex systems where everything seems to be interconnected, a systems thinking view of the world can help you anticipate some of the change you might experience,” explains Bourne.

As an example, he cites a recent project leadership workshop involving a group of public servants tasked with building more prisons to cope with the expanding prison population. “Systems thinking would be asking why people end up in prison in the first place and trying to work across departments to understand the link between things like education and mental health.”

3. Project leadership

Despite the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, one of the most significant areas of expansion in the new APM BoK is concerned with the human factor.

“There is a lot more project leadership in there than there was, and that is very deliberate. Look at all the huge changes we’ve had – COVID-19, the war in Ukraine. A lot of projects these days don’t stay on the rails because the world changes faster than the project can deliver. It’s about dealing with a VUCA [volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous] world.”

Success in such a world requires not only the traditional virtues of project management, such as scheduling and budgets, but also a greater emphasis on active and ongoing project leadership to make sure that what is actually being delivered remains relevant to changing needs and requirements.

“Much of project management is about process. There is a lot of process in the APM BoK, things like scope creep and cost control. But when the world really changes, like it did in the pandemic, cost controls go out of the window and you have to start again by asking, ‘What is it that we really want to do?’ That’s really about judgement, which is where leadership comes in.”