THE ASSOCIATION OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT (APM)

Background

The APM is the largest independent professional body for management in Europe, whose mission is to ‘develop and promote the professional disciplines of project and programme management for the public benefit’.

The knowledge and experience of its extensive membership is captured in the ‘Body of Knowledge’ that forms the cornerstone of competency assessment and demonstration for project and programme managers. The target audience for the APM is project and programme managers, although it can be and is used extensively by other roles and organisations.

The APM ontology

The concept of APM competency in the APM relies on two main elements – the ‘Framework’ and the ‘Body of Knowledge’ which can be seen in the following diagram.

Figure 2.4 shows the APM ontology and it can be seen that the ‘Framework’ uses the ‘Body of Knowledge’. The ‘Framework’ is made up of four ‘Points’, each of which has a number of questions or pieces of advice associated with it that the person must address. These are described as follows:

• ‘1 Review’ refers to an individual’s ability to look at their own abilities and ask four questions: ‘what skills do I have?’, ‘what have I achieved?’, ‘what have I learned?’ and ‘how appropriate are my skills to my current work situation?’ The answers to these questions are recorded in the individual’s personal record. It is suggested that an initial self-assessment is used to generate these answers.

• ‘2 Plan’ refers to an individual’s ability to plan how to get from where they are to where the want to be. The questions that need to be answered are: ‘what gaps are there in my current knowledge and skills?’, ‘what can I do to fill these gaps?’, ‘where do I want to be in five years time?’ and ‘what do I need to do to achieve this and who can help me?’ The answers to these questions are recorded in the individual’s personal development plan, where their objectives are listed in relation to these questions.

• ‘3 Learn and Develop’ refers to an individual’s ability to execute this plan and to capture any relevant information. The advice that is offered here is: ‘keep a record of everything you have achieved’, ‘we are all different, you may learn in a different way to your colleagues’, ‘there will be opportunities to learn and develop that aren’t in your original plan’. Rather than questions, these are pieces of advice that should be followed at all times. In fairness, they are good, solid, common-sense ideas that should be reflected in all aspects of CPD, not just limited to management frameworks.

• ‘4 Assess Achievement’ refers to an individual’s ability to understand what has been achieved and how it helps. The questions that must be answered are: ‘what have I learnt?’, ‘how does this help me now?’, ‘how might it help me in the future?’ and ‘do I need anything to enhance this learning?’ The answers to these questions are recorded in the individual’s development record, which can then be used as a basis for generating CVs, used in interviews, or wherever else is deemed appropriate.

Each of these points is executed as part of an ongoing cycle and in the order shown above. This may be thought of as being like a continuous professional development iteration that is executed time and time again throughout the life cycle of an individual’s career.

The basis of all the questions that are asked here is that a set of skills must be identified by the individual, and this is where the ‘Body of Knowledge’ comes in. The ‘Body of Knowledge’ itself is made up of seven ‘Section(s)’ each of which is made up of one or more ‘Topic(s)’. These sections and their associated topics may be further described as follows (Note, these sections and topics are omitted from the diagram for the sake of clarity. For a full description of these sections and topics, see SFIA.):

• The ‘1 – Project management in context’ section is made up of the following topics: ‘1.1 Project management’, ‘1.2 Programme management’, ‘1.3 Portfolio management’, ‘1.4 Project context’, ‘1.5 Project sponsorship’ and ‘1.6 Project office’.

• The ‘2 – Planning the strategy’ section is made up of the following topics: ‘2.1 Project success and benefits management’, ‘2.2 Stakeholder management’, ‘2.3 Value management’, ‘2.4 Project management plan’, ‘2.5 Project risk management’, ‘2.6 Project quality management’ and ‘2.7 Health, safety and environmental management’.

• The ‘3 – Executing the strategy’ section is made up of the following topics: ‘3.1 Scope management’, ‘3.2 Scheduling’, ‘3.3 Resource management’, ‘3.4 Budgeting and cost management’, ‘3.5 Change control’, ‘3.6 Earned value management’, ‘3.7 Information management’, ‘ 3.8 Issue management’.

• The ‘4 – Techniques’ section is made up of the following topics: ‘4.1 Requirements management’, ‘4.2 Development’, ‘4.3 Estimating’, ‘4.4 Technology management’, ‘4.5 Value engineering’, ‘4.6 Modelling and testing’ and ‘4.7 Configuration management’.

• The ‘5 – Business and commercial’ section is made up of the following topics: ‘5.1 Business case’, ‘5.2 Marketing and sales’, ‘5.3 Project financing and funding’, ‘5.4 Procurement’ and ‘5.5 Legal awareness’.

• The ‘6 – Organisation and governance’ section is made up of the following topics: ‘6.1 Project life cycles’, ‘6.2 Concept’, ‘6.3 Definition’, ‘6.4 Implementation’, ‘6.5 Handover and closeout’, ‘6.6 Project reviews’, ‘6.7 Organisation structure’, ‘6.8 Organisational roles’, ‘6.9 Methods and procedures’ and ‘6.10 Governance of project management’.

• The ‘7 – People and the profession’ section is made up of the following topics: ‘7.1 Communication’, ‘7.2 Teamwork’, ‘7.3 Leadership’, ‘7.4 Conflict management’, ‘7.5 Negotiation’, ‘7.6 Human resources management’, ‘7.7 Behavioural characteristics’, ‘7.8 Learning and development’, ‘7.9 Professionalism and ethics’.

Each of these topics will have a number of activities associated with it that help to increase the knowledge of a particular topic. These activities include: work-based on-the-job training, informal CPD, formal events and qualifications (not shown on the diagram for the sake of clarity). Each of these activities is given an ‘APM Rating’ which may be 1, 2, 3, or 5 (no ‘4’) that provides a weighting for making the calculation to derive the ‘CPD points value’. The individual then decides how valuable the information that has been learned is, by defining the ‘Your Value’ on a scale of 2 to 10 where ‘2’ is considered to be of ‘little value’ and ‘10’ is considered to be of ‘high value’. These two values – the ‘APM Rating’ and the ‘Your Value’ – are then multiplied to provide the ‘CPD Points Value’, which may then be used to provide evidence of competency.

Discussion

The APM framework is particularly interesting as it relies, to quite a large extent, on continuous self-assessment. As part of this assessment, the individual can actually put values onto how valuable the new skills are and use these to show potential employers, professional bodies (for professional qualifications, such as Chartered Project Manager) and for internal company assessments.

It is important when applying these techniques in the APM framework that they are based on realistic estimates of how valuable things are for an individual. Part of the danger of such a numbered scheme is that it is open to abuse. It would be hoped that within a professional discipline, this would not occur, but there is always a need for validating assessments and claims made based on self-assessments.

There may be nothing sinister about somebody over-estimating their own values because, as discussed previously in this book, incompetent people tend to overestimate their own competence.

Accreditation

There is a formal accreditation scheme in place that allows people to be trained and assessed to a number of levels. These are:

In order to gain these qualifications, it is essential that any training provided is recognised by the APM under their ‘accredited provider’ scheme.