When I studied the PMP, I was often quite frustrated while reading the PMBOK or the slides given by my teacher. For exemple, if I read an article on the “Define Scope” process, and saw something about “Project Document Updates”, I had to search to another section(s) to find the full definition and that took a lot of effort.
Being lazy, I started to thing about a way to reorganize the PM information into a more user-friendly version. Even if there is a lot of sources on the internet, I could not find a place where I could truly navigate between PM tools and processes… So I decided to build my own!
First step was to find sources on the internet (since the PM book is not available online). I used the Process Map and built a scraper that could take the information available while googling a document’s name and insert that into a big database.
Sources used includes:
– https://4squareviews.com/
– http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/
– https://project-management-knowledge.com
– https://www.simplilearn.com/
– https://pm-foundations.com/
– http://www.pmbody.com
– http://www.pmplounge.com
– http://projectvictor.com
– https://gastonriou.com
Then I built in VBA a first version of a program that could rebuild the tree of the book, with all the Process Groups, Knowledge Areas, Processes, Inputs, Outputs, Tools, as well as a big glossary of terms:
Then I tried to build up a “wiki” on my website. However, even with the big WordPress community, I could not find a nice-free-easy way to build a wiki… Instead I used a Page Importer to bring all the 700+ pages on my website, and a little extension enabling to convert a keyword into a link to a page.
That way you can surf from one page to another quite easily.
The final part was to build automatically the different menues for every page (to link Processes, Inputs, Outputs and tools.) and to debug lots of errors since the data coming from the web was often not really reliable (dead links, utf-8 issues, wrong data…)
The final result starts to be quite impressive, even if I still have work to do to debug the code and solve some errors:
Next steps could be:
– To insert documents related to the topics,
– To create graphs, images, visuals,
– To add other data (APM…) to have the full view across different conventions
– Add links to real source (for now it just says that the text is from the PMBOK…)
The great think is that I have now a tool that I can deploy in a few clicks an entire tree with all the project management processes ready to be used. So when I start to deploy a new project organisation, that is a great first think to do (Even if after you will have to tailor the solution to your need).
You can access the current version of this wiki via the Mapping or the Glossary.