ESA and all that

When this article was written, the PMI Ethics, Standards, and Accreditation (ESA) Management Group was busy developing PMI Project #121, the effort to develop PMI's project management body of knowledge (PMBOK). This article discusses a framework for understanding and organizing the key functions involved in managing projects, a framework that evolved out of a ten-day seminar in Saudi Arabia that the author led with project managers from other Islamic countries. It describes the author's effort to classify project management functions and create a three-step coding system; it explains the problems that the author encountered in codifying project management functions in relation to the ESA's body of knowledge breakdown structure. It also discusses the author's work in locating definitions for key project management terms such as project and management. It then documents the author's experience in using the ESA breakdown structure to organize his seminar material.