PMBOK 4 going Agile?

The 4th edition of the PMBOK is coming out and a draft edition was made available for current PMP certified and non-certified experienced project managers to review and comment on it. A section that particularly interested me was Section 2.1.3-2:

An iterative relationship, where only one subset is planned at any given time and the planning for the next period is carried out as work progresses on the current deliverable. This approach is useful in largely undefined, uncertain, or rapidly changing environments such as research, but it can lead to rework and reduce the ability to provide long term planning or scope control for the project. It also entails having all of the project team members (e.g. designers, developers, etc.) available throughout the project.

This section was no doubt influenced by the Agile software development and project management movement. Though in all fairness, the PMBOK has acknowledged that many project would be better served using a more iterative approach in the form of progressive elaboration or "rolling wave planning" since the 2000 version, I believe.



This notion addresses the idea of planning near term work in detail and later work in less detail. Then as new details emerge, going back to the plans and updating them with the new data. This is common sense to those in the Agile community, yet it seems that many in the Agile community seem unaware that it has been in the PMBOK for the last 8 years since, unfortunately, many Agile evangelists choose to ignore these important principles in the PMBOK Guide.

At least in regard to PMI, they seem to have acknowledged the importance of a more iterative approach and seem to have made it more explicit in the upcomming 4th edition of the PMBOK, since as they state "for multi-phase projects, more than one phase-to-phase relationship could occur during different parts of a project".