The conversation around agile Software Development and PMBOK come back again. Bas de Baar and others have echoed some posts with this idea that PMBOK should be compared with software development processes, specifically Agile Software Development methods.
Please, everyone, please understand PMBOK is NOT a project management methodology or even more so, a software development method - no matter how bad you want it to be. PMBOK is not a stalking horse for anti-project manager messages. In the same way CMMI-DEV V1.2 and the other red herrings "water fall" are. Neither of these three are "methodologies" in the way Scrum, XP, Crystal, DSDM, etc. are development methods. These are orthogonal comparisons.
When the conversation starts like Schizophrenic Use Of Methods it's down hill from there. It's troubling that such learnered thought leaders can't separate process groups and knowledge areas from methodologies.
But they're not the same.
Let's start with a good description of Scrum.
(Bill Wake provided this diagram for a Carnegie Mellon course I gave a few years ago. Thank you Bill.)
And of course the PMBOK Process Groups and the Knowledge Areas and their relationships.
With these two diagrams, and a little effort, you can map the Scrum processes to the PMBOK Process Groups and Knowledge Areas. This has been done several times over. But it doesn't seem to stick. When Yves comments that project managers should learn about agile, he is technically correct. PM's should learn about agile as a software development method in place of weaker and more risky methods - usually linear in form.
But writing the software, gathering the requirements, testing the software, managing the configuration of the software are in the execution process group. These software development methods are part of "building the product," in the CMMI context - the Technical Solution (TS).
There are other processes and many more knowledge areas of PMBOK that are not directly related with writing software for money. In the CMMI-DEV domain this is even more the case.
So I would urge all to understand that PMBOK is not a method. Scrum is not a project management framework - unless the artifacts of the PMBOK Process Groups and Knowledge Areas are added - augmented in some form.
