Download USA-NCB, the PPM National Competence Baseline

A team of dedicated and experienced Project Managers worked for over two years to deliver the USA's National Competence Baseline, the foundation for our 4-Level-Certification program. Based on the IPMA Competence Baseline, from International Project Management Association, this is the foundation of a proven international certification program that certifies the competence and knowledge of multiple different levels of Program and Project Managers and Project Practitioners.

In addition to its basis for the USA's only Competence-based certifications of Project Managers, Senior Project Managers and Program Managers, USA-NCB is also an appropriate foundation for Learning and Development that has the the unique potential to improve PM Performance. Other popular bodies of knowledge, while a useful foundation for basic learning, do not necessarily provide the rich background needed for PM Competence and Performance. Thus, increasingly, savvy PM Educators and PM trainers are adopting USA-NCB as an additional and useful learning framework for their workshops and classes. To support that, asapm also provides the PM Competence Model, a learning and development assessment tool that is aligned with the USA-NCB.

Get the NCB Release 2.0
To get your copy of the USA-NCB, download it by clicking this link. The link dowloads the NCB in Adobe Acrobat format (pdf, 400K).

More About the NCB (from its Introduction)
The USA’s National Competence Baseline is a framework for assessment and certification of the knowledge, experience, behavioral attributes, and competence of Project participants. It provides a career ladder suitable for use by a range of project participants, from team member and leader, to Project Manager of increasingly complex Projects, to Program Manager. In addition to its use in building a career ladder, it helps focus an organization’s learning and coaching, and assists practitioners at all levels in self-assessment. Finally, it is the basis for our certification at increasingly higher levels of demonstrated competence, and of project responsibility.

The USA-NCB is a taxonomy (or classification structure) of key Project Management and related Elements, not a body of knowledge. In the domain of effective Project Managers, the true body of knowledge spans thousands of books and publications, and lives on in the experience of hundreds of thousands of competent project participants. As a taxonomy, it represents a starting-point, not the ending-point, for your personal discovery and assessment of your knowledge, behavioral attributes, experiences and competences as a Project Manager or project stakeholder.

asapm uses this document as the foundation for our 4-Level Competence-based Certification program exams. We have other, more specific documents, some for public use and others for internal use, to supplement this competence baseline. The documents for public use will assist individuals and organizations in understanding the overall certification program. Internal documents support the governance, procedures, practices, and functions of the program.

While the USA-NCB provides brief coverage of each key Element of Project Management, it does not provide comprehensive treatment. Rather, it provides an overview of each Element that should be sufficient (together with a separately-available self-assessment tool, PM CompModel) for an experienced project participant to perform a self-assessment. As a competence baseline, this document is the framework for assessment of the results that a Project Manager has produced.

How We Use NCB
We are now accepting individual and group applications for the USA's only suite of Performance-Competence-Based certifications, available in our use of IPMA's World-recognized 4-Level Certification program:

• asapm Certified Project Associate, IPMA Level D®
• asapm Certified Project Manager, IPMA Level C® and
• asapm Certified Senior Project Manager, IPMA Level B®.
• asapm Certified Program Manager, IPMA Level A®.

We are encouraging applications for intact groups of 10 or more, to ease scheduling and arrangements needed for the implementation of the rigorous exam (and interview process, where applicable). To find out more, please contact us.