Is the PMBOK® Guide descriptive?
It's common to say that PRINCE2® is prescriptive, while the PMBOK Guide is descriptive. I don't think so, though.
Both PRINCE2 and the PMBOK Guide are telling people what actions are correlated with success. One frames it as, "Do ______, if you want to be successful", while the other says, "Successful projects do ______" and implies that, "You probably want to do the same".
These are two sides of the same coin. A truly descriptive resource only tells you what's common in projects without judging what's right and what's wrong. That's not what people expect from their project management resources; they expect something that helps them be more successful. (And, of course, to learn what wrong ideas are popular, we have LinkedIn!)
Update 2025-09-11: After I reposted this article on LinkedIn on 2025-09-11, Bill Duncan, the [co]author of the first version of the PMBOK Guide, commented the following, which he had originally published in an article in PMI's PMNetwork:
The standards development community recognizes three major categories of standards:
- Descriptive standards. These are documents that tell the facts, details, or particulars of something. A document that described the characteristic symptoms of a flu sufferer would be a descriptive standard.
- Normative standards. These are documents that provide guidelines (norms) to be used as a basis for measurement, comparison, or decisions. A document that listed alternative approaches to treating the flu would be a normative standard.
- Prescriptive standards. These are documents that define a particular way of doing something. A document that specified a two week course of a specific antibiotic would be a prescriptive standard.
These distinctions help, but there is still room for confusion. For example, the first two chapters of the PMBOK Guide are primarily descriptive — they tell the facts, details, and particulars of certain aspects of project management. Chapters 3 through 12 are primarily normative — they provide a description of generally accepted knowledge and practice that you can use to measure your own. And the glossary was intended to be prescriptive — these are the definitions you should use, and if you use others, you should alert your fellow professionals to that fact.
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