The IFPPM is a Canadian federally registered non-profit organization. Key milestones in the history of the IFPPM are provided below.
2007. The original Deeply Practical Project Management (DPPM) course was developed by William Stewart based on his training and experience managing complex multi-domain projects in the aerospace industry. Over the next fifteen years, Stewart taught the course more than 330 times to more than 3,300 people from a wide range of industry, government, and non-profit organizations, and helped teams plan more than 1,000 different projects. Based on this real-world experience, the course was streamlined down to the essential thread of practical best practices applicable to any size project in any domain, defining a specific step by step methodology that maximizes the chances of project success with the least effort.
2017. The book Deeply Practical Project Management was published, together with an online version of the course. As of 2024, the online DPPM courses had more than 125K students from around the world, with more than 3M minutes watched each year, validating the need for a practical project management methodology that can be used immediately by anyone.
2020. In response to repeated requests, a complete example of project management documentation was prepared for a realistic, multi-domain project called Magical Devices Version 3 (MDV3), demonstrating how the DPPM methodology can be implemented in real life. The MDV3 example is now used by tens of thousands of people around the world as a model to build the PM documentation for their own projects.
2021. An informal practical project manager certification was offered to those that finished the DPPM course. As of 2024, thousands of people were referencing the DPPM course and their certifications on LinkedIn, demonstrating the need for a more formal process providing a numbered certification validated by an exam.
2022. In response to repeated requests, the book How To Plan Your Project With Microsoft Office was published. This book provides step by step descriptions of how to use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Project to plan your project scope, schedule, budget, and generate all the reports you need for professional project management.
2024. To help explain the difference between project management and project development, the book Project Development Methodologies was published. This book describes the most common options for development of the project output during the execution stage, including waterfall, incremental, iterative, spiral, Lean, Kanban, Agile, Scrum, and others. Understanding how these methodologies developed and why enables you to optimize processes in general throughout all your work.
2024. To meet the demand for formal DPPM certifications, the IFPPM was established as a Canadian federally registered non-profit organization. The purpose of the IFPPM is "To be the world’s central source for practical project management information and resources, including documentation, templates, examples, training, and certification. The IFPPM has a special focus on provision of cost-effective outreach and resources for the non-profit sector, including associations, governments, non-governmental organizations, and other non-profit organizations."
Future. In the years ahead, the IFPPM will put a special focus on the following areas:
- Helping non-profits of all kinds implement practical project management and certify their project managers.
- Build out the library of examples to show how the DPPM methodology can be applied to a variety of domains.
- Provide funding and assistance to help develop open source applications as free software alternatives to the expensive Microsoft Project.
- Hold conferences to share information and resources on how to manage projects in the most effective, practical, and efficient manner.
More information about the relationship between the IFPPM, PMI, and IPMA, and various other matters, can be found on the FAQ page.
