Project Management Standards

See Our Trail of past Standards Updates, for December 2005

Standards Introduction
We develop standards to support the needs of the project management profession — a profession that is broader than our membership. The profession includes project managers and project team members; consultants, educators, and trainers; project customers and sponsors; and senior managers and all other project stakeholders. We believe that our members' needs are best supported by our focus on the broader profession.

Our Standards Development Program is open to all — beginners and old hands, members and non-members, practitioners and academics. We strive to reach real consensus at each step of the development and approval process. Every voice is important.

We develop high-quality standards. Our processes and outputs conform to requirements defined by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

asapm standards are available at low cost to everyone in order to encourage their widespread use. Our standards are updated on a regular basis to ensure their usefulness and applicability.

For more information on our Standards efforts, see: asapm Working on Global PM Performance-Based Standards.

asapm Standards Director
Bill Duncan

Volunteers
We develop broad standards intended to meet the needs of most projects, most of the time, and application-area-specific standards targeted at narrower audiences. To do this, we need plenty of volunteers! You will be on the leading edge of standards development through your participation in this program.

Volunteers are needed to

• Work as team members on standards development projects.
• Manage standards development projects.
• Submit ideas for new project management standards.
• Suggest asapm endorsement of existing standards published by other organizations.

Current Projects

Project Charter
Aristotle is credited with being the first to note that "well-begun is half-done." Perhaps nowhere is that more true than with projects. A team of nearly 100 contributors and reviewers is working to develop a standard detailing what information a project manager should have in-hand before moving past the "fuzzy front end."

Glossary
Comedian Steve Martin once noted "those Frenchmen have a different word for everything." This sentiment is often true in project management as well where one person's charter is another's scope statement, and one application area's contingency is another's management reserve. While it may not be practical to expect project managers to ever speak the same language, a glossary of terms that documents current usage would be a useful tool.

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