Tapping into experience of well over a hundred excellent projects assessed worldwide by hundreds of professionals over a period of 13 years was an exciting journey that took us almost two years. What we have discovered is not about “leading standards” or “best practices”, but about ways to reach beyond them. And now we are ready to share it in the form of the IPMA Project Excellence Baseline® – to be announced during the September IPMA World Congress in Panama.

The IPMA International Project Excellence Awards programme has been active since 2002. Most of us will remember the programme for it’s glamorous events during annual IPMA World Congresses in which exceptional projects from virtually all continents have been rewarded for their excellence in management. What’s less obvious is the fact that behind the scenes the program is one of the largest worldwide decidated to helping the PM community to discover new innovative approaches to managing projects. Every year dozens of professionals volunteering as assessors visit project sites around the world, observing their management systems, interviewing 20-30 stakeholders per project giving the PMA community a unique opportunity to gain insight about the ways project teams innovate in management and obtain results way beyond already challenging project objectives.

Two years ago the IPMA Awards Management Board (AMBO) decided to capitalise on this experience and completely revise the IPMA Project Excellence Model which has been used for assessing projects since the member association from Germany (GPM) developed its first EFQM inspired version in 1996. The project team and sounding boards, both composed of experienced IPMA PE Award assessors, PM practitioners, researchers and members of other IPMA standards teams have spent around 350 person-days on reshaping the Project Excellence Model. The result is a new IPMA standard called Project Excellence Baseline (IPMA PEB).

The main purpose of the PEB is to describe the concept of excellence in managing projects and programmes. PEB also serves as a guide to organisations in assessing the ability of their projects and programmes to achieve project excellence. As other IPMA baselines, the PEB embraces diversity in the ways projects are managed. Therefore, it is designed to be of use in any context and regardless of the specific industry, sector or project management approach.

We are very excited to bring it to a wider audience this fall in Panama. In the meantime, you can expect to see a series of articles on IPMA blogs that will give you a glimpse of ideas that will be a part of the model. So, stay tuned!

Grzegorz Szalajko

Leading Editor of IPMA PEB