We see that every organization gives its own flavor and tailors the method of its choice to the specific needs. The International Project Management Association (IPMA) has developed a competence standard that fits this need, and gives us a direction to follow.

In the Individual Competence Baseline (ICB) they have described 29 competence elements of project, programme and portfolio management. It is one of the most comprehensive framework for managing projects that is currently available in the world. With its certification system it provides a useful instrument in boosting the project management competence.

Compared with the ICB version 3, released in 2007, the recently released ICB version 4 (ICB 4) has had some major revisions, that gave it a unique distinction when you compare it to all other project management standards that are available.

There are three main areas in the ICB 4:

practice, people and perspective competences.

Instead of only looking at het methodological side of a project (practice), the competence standard also looks at the people on the project and the skills that you need to develop, and last but not least the contextual perspective.

Better practices” come after “best practices

Although linguistically not correct, “better practices” come after “best practices”. The best practices that are covered in this book are the starting point for further development in your competence. When you have learned the best practice, when you have applied them, there ought to be a development to better. That’s one of the messages the book wants to communicate, a continuous development of competences in all of the three main areas.

Now look at the final competence element in each of the three main areas. For the project manager competences in practice this is change and transformation, projects are there to transform the world into a better place. The last People skill is result orientation, this fully aligns with the one in Practice, it is all about delivering results that make things better. And finally when we look at the last one in the Perspective area we are delivering value to our culture.

One of the things that we, who are involved in managing projects, need to do is to improve our competence, and in doing this improving the success rate of our project. And to be honest, that has been and will be the ultimate goal of this book.


Source: https://community.vanharen.net/the-icb-version-4-and-the-4th-edition-better-practices-project-management/