APM Body of Knowledge

What is the APM Body of Knowledge?
A foundational resource providing the concepts, functions, and activities that make up professional project management. It expands beyond time, cost, and quality to embrace project management as integral to strategic change delivery.

Strategic Change

What is Strategic Change?
Beneficial change resulting from an organisation's strategic intent, ambitions and needs achieved through the management of projects, programmes and portfolios.

Project-Based Working

What is Project-Based Working?
Refers collectively to projects, programmes, and portfolios, acknowledging that not all aspects apply equally to each.

Project Professional

Who is a Project Professional?
Anyone working in a defined role within a project, programme, or portfolio.

Strategic Intent

What is Strategic Intent?
A term used to describe the aspirational plans, overarching purpose or the intended direction of travel needed to reach an organizational vision.

Benefits Realization

What is Benefits Realization?
Ensuring that benefits are derived from outputs and outcomes in alignment with stakeholders needs from strategic portfolios and programmes.

Linear Life Cycles

What are Linear Life Cycles?
The completion of project-work within a single pass through the cycle, where projects are sequenced into a set of distinct phases, from development, to deployment through an ultimate outcome, output or realized benefits.

Iterative Life Cycles

What are Iterative Life Cycles?
Life Cycles composed of several iterations allowing the deployment of initial capability, followed by successive deliveries of further value. They are based on the idea of concurrency, or simultaneous engineering, where different development steps are allowed to be performed in parallel.

Hybrid Life Cycles

What are Hybrid Life Cycles?
A pragmatic mix of philosophies, typically fusing together elements from predictive and adaptive perspectives to create a new model or approach. An example would be Utilizing iterative or agile methods for early requirements gathering, where the uncertainty is greatest, and following it up with incremental or sequential processes to formalize deployment.

Extended Life Cycles

What are Extended Life Cycles?
life cycles that ensure that accountability and governance of the investment stays with the change teams until the change is fully embedded by offering the missing connection to benefit realisation, whilst preventing the formation of knowledge boundaries between project teams and operations.

Product Life Cycle

What is a Product Life Cycle?
Takes a broader view of the full product life span from initial idea, through development, evolution and upgrades to removal from service and ultimate dismantling

Governance

What is Governance?
The framework of authority and accountability that defines and controls the outputs, outcomes and benefits from projects, programmes and portfolios.

Assurance

What is Assurance?
The process of providing confidence to the governance board that the project, or wider programme or portfolio is on track to deliver the intended benefits.

Sustainability

What is Sustainability?
balancing the environmental, social, economic and administrative aspects of project-based work to meet the current needs of stakeholders without compromising or overburdening future generations

Sponsor

Who is a Sponsor?
The person accountable for ensuring that the work is governed effectively and delivers the objectives to meet identified needs.

Benefits

What are Benefits?
A positive and measurable impact of change that the organization needs and initiates changes that are forecast to deliver.

Business Readiness

What is Business Readiness?
a continiuous activity that identifies if business will be in the right place to administer the interfaces between ‘change’ and ‘run’ work

The PMO

What is the PMO?
The part of the organisational structure that provides support for projects, programmes and portfolios

Decision Gates

What are Decision Gates?
The decision points between life cycle phases where governance makes the determination that all the requirements of that particular phase have been met to progress

Stakeholder

Who is a Stakeholder?
individuals and groups who have an interest or role in the project, programme or portfolio, or are impacted by it and require engagement

Teams

What are Teams?
Groups of people with a common aim that not only cooperate but collaborate

Ethics

What is Ethics?
A key requirement in working professioanlly in project managemnet, ensuring that all actions are legal with a commitment to act in accordance with organizational and professional codes of conduct, maintaining a trusted profession