On the use and abuse of Technology and its Management from the perspective of an academic at UCL specialising in Project Management, Systems Engineering and Space Science/Technology.

Friday, March 03, 2006

New APM Body of Knowledge

After a long gestation, the APM have published an updated Body of Knowledge. It's much improved over the previous version, and contains helpful notes and references on a wide range of project management topics. Material on Strategic management of projects, Issue management, Technical/Technology management, Processes, Governance, Learning and Ethics have all been added now, and the majority of the rest upgraded and updated. In other words, it's useful. The only snag is how you get hold of it.
The APM Body of Knowledge 5th edition has been written by practising project managers for practising project managers. It is designed to support frontline practitioners, consultants, advisers, senior managers in project-driven organisations, trainers, students, researchers, authors, publishers, librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers. It is used by the APM as a foundation for its membership, professional development and knowledge services.

ISBN: 1-903494-13-3
APM Publishing Bookshop
You can have a taste of some of the underlying definitions on the main APM website (PDF here), but basically they are charging money for the main dish.

I personally think they should be propagating this quite freely, since their membership route is now linked to an examination of this knowledge. I suspect many training providers may amortize the cost of the publication into their fees!

(Disclosure: I work for an organisation providing APM-accredited training.)

3 comments:

SuperJane said...

And if training providers buy the BoK for their delegates and somehow absorb the cost - this merely perpetuates the APM's decision to charge for it.

The APM should at least make it available free on-line read-only, as ECCH does for case studies. But they seemed to be resistant to this when we suggested it at the last forum.

PS: sorry about the previous deleted comment - it was me screwing up as usual!

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Anonymous said...

www.apm.org.uk/sites/default/.../Members'_Area_BoK_1109_0.pdf