PMBOK 8 Focus Areas vs Process Groups: What Changed?
Open the Eighth Edition at the Focus Areas and the first impression is that nothing much has happened. Initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, closing: the same five words in the same order that anyone trained on the Sixth Edition could recite in their sleep. The change is not in the names. It is in what the names are attached to.
A Process Group was a filing system. Each of the Sixth Edition's forty-nine processes was assigned to exactly one of the five, and the groups existed so that a long list could be organised into something a reader could navigate. Focus Areas file nothing. The forty processes in the Eighth Edition sit inside the performance domains, which means no process belongs to a Focus Area at all. What the five names carry now is five kinds of attention a project needs, any number of which can be live in the same week.
What a Process Group was for
The Sixth Edition had a real organisational problem to solve. Forty-nine processes, each with its inputs, tools and outputs, need some scheme by which a reader can find the one they want, and the answer was a grid: ten knowledge areas down one axis, five process groups across the other. Develop Schedule could be located at schedule management and planning. Control Costs sat at cost management and monitoring and controlling. As a way of organising a reference book it worked perfectly well.
The scheme was not the problem. The damage came from the shape those five group names suggested to anyone who had not read the surrounding text with care. Five words in that order look like five stages, and a great many project managers, training providers and PMO templates treated them as stages, producing plans in which planning finished before executing began and monitoring arrived somewhere near the end. The Sixth Edition warned against the reading more than once and drew the overlapping effort across a project's life to make the point visually. The warning lost. Names are stronger than caveats.
Five kinds of attention, running together
Section 4.5 of The Standard for Project Management sets out the five and describes them as areas of attention that overlap and recur across a project's life, taking some trouble along the way to stop anyone reading them as five blocks in a row.
Two properties do most of the work. The first is recurrence. Initiating is not something that happened back in February; it happens whenever a piece of work needs authority and clarity it does not yet have, which is at every phase boundary, at every significant release in adaptive delivery, whenever a new workstream is added, and whenever the business case shifts enough that the existing authorisation no longer covers what the team is doing. Closing behaves the same way, applying to a phase, a contract, a supplier arrangement or a single workstream, and not only to the project entire.
The second property is simultaneity. On an ordinary Tuesday, a project of any size is executing one thing, planning the next, monitoring a third, closing a fourth and initiating a fifth. That was true under the Sixth Edition too. The Eighth Edition's structure simply stops inviting anybody to draw it as a sequence and then wonder why the project will not behave like the drawing.
A practical consequence follows straight away. The question "which process group is this in" has stopped having a useful answer, since the processes are filed elsewhere now. What replaces it is a better question in any case: which kind of attention is this project short of? A team executing well and monitoring poorly has a different problem from a team monitoring closely that never properly initiated its second phase, and those two situations call for different action from the project manager.
Three services, five focus areas, one week
A broadcaster's platform team was replacing the subtitling pipeline across three services, releasing one service at a time over roughly seven months. In the week the second service went live, all five were running at once and not one of them was a stage.
Executing was the cutover itself and the on-call arrangement around it. Monitoring and controlling was the error rate on the first service, live for nine weeks by then, with a defect profile nobody had forecast. Planning was the third service, whose rights position made the same technical approach awkward and sent the design back for rework. Closing was the first service's supplier arrangement, where the acceptance criteria had been met and the commercial closure had not been started. Initiating was the third service as well, running at the same time as its planning, because the rights question meant the existing authorisation no longer stretched to the approach and somebody had to go back to the sponsor for a decision.
Under a five-stage reading, that last one would have been invisible. The project was long past its initiation, so the authority question would have been logged as a change request, joined a queue and come back three weeks later with the design team idle. Treating initiating as recurring attention put it in front of the sponsor in four days.
For a PMP® candidate, the reading that helps is that the five names describe where a project's attention needs to be, and that a situation can sit in more than one of them at once. A team mid-delivery that has just been told the regulatory basis of its work has changed is facing an initiating question arriving inside execution, and handling it purely as change control misses half of what has happened. The question to ask is what kind of attention a situation calls for, before reaching for the name of a process, and fluency at that comes from meeting it across situations that differ in their particulars, which a structured PMP exam preparation course arranges deliberately.
The improvement costs an hour with a plan and a pen. Take the phase-gate plan that shows initiating at the front and closing at the back, and mark every point where a piece of work will need fresh authority, and every point where something ends and hands over to someone. Most plans collect four or five of each. Those points are where projects lose time quietly, because nobody left room for them, and a plan that names them is a plan somebody can resource.
Interested in going further?
Most of the value here sits in the gap between knowing the five names and spotting an authority question hiding inside a delivery week. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the right response depends on recognising which kind of attention has gone missing.
The five Focus Areas and the structure built around them are set out in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A036: Focus on Value: The Principle Behind Better Trade-offs
A010: PMBOK 8 Performance Domains vs the Old Knowledge Areas
A007: The Standard for Project Management vs the PMBOK Guide
A073: Executing in an Adaptive Project
A045: Sustainability in Project Management: What It Means in Practice
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