For much of my working life I have been involved in developing project managers and consulting with organisations who want to improve their project delivery.Over the years, I felt I was spending far too much time explaining the differences between various bodies of knowledge, methods and other guides. These were rarely fundamental differences of principle and most people I worked with saw them as irritating inconsistencies that simply added an unnecessary layer of confusion. All they wanted to do was to understand the basic concepts of good practice and apply them in as efficient a way as possible.I long harboured the ambition of getting the publishers of the various guides together to try and harmonise their message but this proved to be an impossible task.

Eventually in 2012, after a couple of years working on version 6 of the APM’s Body of Knowledge, events conspired to provide the opportunity to create the Praxis Framework. Starting with a blank sheet of paper, I took the tried and tested practices of numerous guides and reworked them so that they fitted together seamlessly – or at least as seamlessly as seemed practical.The process made me think long and hard about a few areas that are treated slightly differently in the Praxis Framework: the nature of projects, programmes and portfolios, and the nature of capability maturity being the main ones.

The world that Praxis is born into is a very different one from that of the 1980s and 1990s when most of the current well-known guides first came into being. The Wikipedia generation expect this kind of basic information to be freely available online and so the www.PraxisFramework.org website was launched on 1st May 2014. Publishing online doesn’t only make the information highly accessible, it also makes it open for all practitioners to comment and contribute. I hope the Praxis Framework will evolve to be a community-driven framework with frequent and regular updates that reflect how projects are actually managed.The growing list of contributors can be found at http://www.praxisframework.org/resource-pages/contributorsOf course, even the best of websites doesn’t have the tactile quality of a book. The opportunity to leaf through pages, highlight text and make margin notes still appeals to most of us. So, I will start my acknowledgements by saying thank you to everyone at the APM for taking on the role of book publisher – and particularly to James Simons for seeing the project through, on-time and on budget.