The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing.
The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.
The most valuable assets of the 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.
In the years since the Agile Manifesto was written in 2001, the formation of the Scrum Alliance and the publication of the Scrum Guide, the level and intensity of complexity and uncertainty assaulting organizations in every environment – for profit, not for profit, institutional and governmental – has increased along a non-linear curve.
In response, the world of Agile Project Management has been evolving for many years at the intersection of Lean Principles and the Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, (PMBOK® Guide), Project Management Institute, Inc. 2012. In 2012 PMI added some initial Agile content to the PMBOK® Guide Fifth Edition and launched the Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) certification which became the fastest growing certification in PMI history. The next big step came in 2017 when the PMBOK® Guide Sixth Edition was released with Agile content in every, single knowledge area.
The final Agile step into mainstream, professional project management came with the release in 2021 of the PMBOK® Guide Seventh Edition that changed the standard’s overall approach, the architectural design of the content, and was accompanied by the launch a new platform, The Standards Plus™ Interactive Digital Content Platform to provide “How To” content for current, emerging and future practices.
Sadly, perhaps, the Scrum Alliance and the Scrum Guide have failed to be agile and innovate to the degree required for them to remain relevant in the marketplace. Interestingly, PMI has responded by embracing transformational change at every level and in every facet of their enterprise, thereby reemerging with enviable marketplace positioning.
These changes were, and are, so fundamental and so far-reaching that real-world practitioners need a complete yet concise, authoritative yet accessible, reference and Field Guide which this Second Edition, in the tradition set by the First Edition, provides.
