A performance domain is an area a project has to perform well in, and the eighth edition of the PMBOK Guide names seven of them. A focus area is a kind of work, and there are five. The forty processes sit where the two meet, which is why the structure is easier to hold as a grid than as a list. Together the three make up the guide, which sits beneath the standard and its six principles.
This arrangement is the eighth edition reconciling two things that had been alternatives. The sixth edition and earlier were built on processes and offered little on mindset. The seventh removed processes entirely in favour of principles and domains, which left practitioners without the procedural detail they had been using. The eighth keeps the principles and domains and puts the processes back. The sections below describe the seven domains, the five focus areas, why the processes returned and how the structure is used to place an examination scenario.
The seven performance domains
| Domain | What has to go well | Where it usually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Governance | Decisions get made by the people entitled to make them, at the speed the work needs | Decision rights that were never written down, so every choice becomes an escalation |
| Scope | What is being produced is agreed, bounded and traceable to a need | Scope that changed by accumulation, with no decision anywhere in the record |
| Schedule | Work is sequenced and paced so that commitments are credible | A plan built from durations somebody wanted, with nobody having estimated them |
| Finance | Money is estimated, authorised, spent and reported against a baseline | A budget with no reserve, which is a forecast being presented as a commitment |
| Stakeholders | The people affected are identified, understood and engaged in proportion to their influence | A register written at initiation and never revisited, so the late arrival is the expensive one |
| Resources | People, equipment, materials and facilities are available in the quantity and at the moment the work needs them | Physical resources planned as though they were as fungible as effort |
| Risk | Uncertainty is identified, analysed, responded to and monitored, on the upside as well as the down | A register maintained as a compliance artefact and never consulted as a control |
Finance and Governance being named domains is the change most worth noticing. Earlier editions distributed both across other areas, and a candidate who learned cost management as a knowledge area now has to recognise the same material under a heading that also takes in funding, benefits and the financial case.
The five focus areas
Each domain has work to do at several points in the project's life, and the focus areas name those points. Initiating establishes that the work should happen and authorises it. Planning decides how. Executing produces the deliverables. Monitoring and controlling compares what is happening against what was intended and corrects the difference. Closing finishes the work formally and transfers what it produced.
The names invite one error, which is to read the five as phases in a timeline. A project is initiating once and monitoring throughout, and an adaptive delivery running two week iterations passes through planning, executing, monitoring and a form of closing inside every one of them.
Every domain has work in more than one focus area, and monitoring and controlling touches all seven. Reading the structure as a grid is what makes it usable, because the grid shows that a domain is never finished at a stage boundary.
Why the processes came back
The shaded cells are the forty processes, and their return is the eighth edition's largest structural change. The seventh edition asked practitioners to derive their methods from principles. For an experienced project manager that worked. For somebody meeting a subject for the first time, or handing work to a colleague, it removed the shared vocabulary that made a plan legible to a reader who had not written it.
The forty are described as nonprescriptive, which is a deliberate word. They are available and none of them is mandatory, and choosing which to run and how formally to run them is the tailoring decision. Running all forty on a two month piece of work is a recognisable failure, and so is running none of them on a programme with three suppliers and a regulator.
How the structure is used on the examination
The examination is organised by the content outline's three domains, so no question will ask a candidate to list the seven. What the structure does is settle where a scenario belongs, and that is often the whole difficulty.
A question about a supplier missing a delivery date could be schedule, resources or risk depending on what is actually being asked. Where the deliverable is late, it is schedule. Where the material will not be on site when the crew is, it is resources. Where it has not happened yet and might, it is risk. The domains are how a candidate names what the scenario is really about before choosing an action, and the wrong answers in a well built question are usually right answers to a neighbouring domain.