Agile Mapping for PMBOK Knowledge Areas

In my previous blog post I wrote about the probable mapping between PMBOK Process Groups to Agile processes. PMBOK organizes the five project management process groups and the project management processes to nine project management knowledge areas. The project management institutes recommends that project managers have a good understanding of these knowledge area to deliver outstanding service to their customers.




PMBOK Knowledge Areas:

At the outset the PMBOK knowledge areas look more in tune with the water fall development. But true agile practitioners will see a a lot of overlap in the knowledge that they need to successfully manage a agile/scrum delivery in the PMBOK process. For example the PMBOK Integration Management  can be directly mapped in agile to
1. Release Planning
2. Backlog Grooming
3. Reviews and Retrospectives
4. Burndown Visibility
This kind of mapping I found becomes necessary when talking about agile development with Project Managers and Business Analysts who have been trained in the traditional methodologies. I have tried to create a mapping table between the PMBOK knowledge areas and agile for reference to agile practitioners to use in conversations with PMO folks.

You can see from the table that it misses the following PMBOK knowledge areas in the agile mapping

1. Procurement Managemet
2. Project Cost Management

These two are basically in my view enterprise level tasks and best left to the PMO. We can also give a fair amount of control over the Time Management to PMO for making the agile projects enterprise grade.

By showing the PMO and Business analyst that agile is not a renegade process and explining that agile artifacts and ceremonies are indeed easily mappable to PMBOK process groups and knowledge areas we can elevate agile acceptance in the enterprise.