Some time ago a new word appeared on my horizon, Praxis Framework. I would like to share my opinion about the framework, looking at it through the eyes of a typical Software Development Manager. Before I begin, I must apologize for my style; I write and will keep writing all my texts alone, as a human, assisted by the free tier of Grammarly to fix my typos or convert British English to American she likes more, but not following AI to re-word my phrases or even write the whole text based on my prompts (but, of course, if I were a copywriter professionally observing the framework, I would use this opportunity).

Personally, I find appealing the name. The quote: “Praxis is all about practical application of knowledge. Through community involvement, Praxis should become a repository of knowledge that project, programme and portfolio managers can apply practically.”

The first thing that I found very valuable on the Praxis Framework website was the Praxis Maturity 360 Assessment tool. You can register, create a new project record, walk through the multiple pages with numerous checkboxes, save your result, share if you want, and compare it with others in the database. Here is the screenshot of the first page:

The value this tool can bring, in addition to an evaluation of the project page by page, is:

• if you are a project manager of an ongoing project, no matter what methodology you use, you can walk around the assessment pages and find some practices that you’ve probably missed in your project, with no deep diving into the framework documentation.
• if you are interested in getting into the framework structure, this may be the shortest way.
• if someone thinks that the project manager is not needed on a project, just ask him/her to open the assessment tool and have a look at all the questions 🙂

By the way, the World Health Organisation used checklists to reduce surgical mortality by 47%. “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right“, a book by Atul Gawande is the #1 Best Seller in the Hospital Administration category on Amazon. If you haven’t used checklists yet, start right now!

Other interesting parts for me were the Glossary, a comprehensive list of all terms in Project Management from all major PM standards, such as PMBoK, Prince2, and ISO 21500, and Encyclopaedia, with explanations of them and samples of usage for a fictional company.

The “PROJECT in a box” software, suggested on the Praxis site as an accompanying tool for project and portfolio management was seen alive in 2020. Now the website is not available, at least in Poland. Too bad, I’d like to try it.

As a framework, Praxis is abstract enough to be tailored to any type of project. The creator, Adrian Dooley, makes things even more borderless by removing classical distinctions of different things in his articles:

• “is it a project, programme or portfolio?” is the wrong question. The right questions are “How complex is the scope and how do I need to manage that complexity?”
• “Don’t try to define ‘project’ and ‘programme’”... “Projects, programmes and portfolios are collaborative initiatives that are carefully planned to achieve a unique aim.”
• “we should stop using the terms Agile and Waterfall (and, as a consequence, Hybrid) and just talk about agility”.

My conclusion? Praxis Framework deserves your time if you are a newbie in Project management and want to get an understanding of the whole P3 landscape, or say have a need to put things in order, do an audit of an ongoing project or set of projects, or even set a PMO with strict budget limit. Will you need Praxis Framework certification? I guess not, I haven’t seen any vacancy where that exact certification would be required.