Introduction
This paper is a 'discussion' paper rather than a 'solution' paper and describes
the possibilities for a structured arrangement of the elements of a body of
knowledge for project management. The purpose of such a structured arrangement
would be to provide the basis for a more systematic discussion of project management
issues. Such issues include the impact on project management practice as a professional
discipline in various parts of the world and on different types of project by
virtue of the diversity of their cultural norms and values.
Clearly, any proposed knowledge structure must be responsive to the working
realities of project management practitioners. So, to capture the types of issues
involved, and to do it in an organized way, we needed a checklist as a reference
baseline. This checklist must not only cover 'theoretical or generic' project
management but also the various practical areas of project management application
(APMA).
Only then can a systematic development be conducted and assembled into a logical
grouping of elements. These elements of knowledge will initially be represented
by a list of discrete project management terms which can then be assembled into
a proposed structure. We will refer to this as a 'Project Management Knowledge
Structure' (PMKS), and the terms it contains we can refer to as Project Management
Knowledge Descriptors (PMKDs).
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