Why is PM² missing from the Finnish project management discussion?

PM² is an open, free project management methodology developed by the European Commission. It is used widely within EU institutions, and the Digital Europe Programme actively promotes it to public administrations across Member States. Yet after reviewing the content published by Finland's leading project management sites, and searching for international adoption examples, there were hardly any hits.

What do Finland's leading sites say about PM²?

PM² did not come up in the content published by Finland's leading PM organisations.

PRINCE2, IPMA (particularly levels C and D), and PMI certifications (particularly PMP) are stated as the most popular in Finland — and most probably so, since Projektiammattilaiset ry, the Finnish PM association, administers IPMA certifications. Lighter and agile-oriented approaches such as P3.express, Kanban, Scrum, and various hybrid models are also covered. That said, purely agile methods like Scrum originate from the needs of continuous, incremental product development and, as such, don't include defined project roles in the traditional sense.

Beyond being open and free, PM²'s strengths include its practicality, simplicity, and the way its parts fit together (see The pillars of the PM² house). The coherence has been a guiding design principle from the start.

The gap isn't unique to Finland

Extending the search beyond Finland — specifically to nearby countries and Northern Europe, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, and the Netherlands — the picture stayed the same: there is plenty of official material on the Commission's own PM² portal, but publicly documented, named adoption stories from national public administrations or EU-funded projects are scarce, whether in Finnish or in other Northern European languages.

This doesn't mean the methodology isn't used in Member States — the Commission actively encourages it as part of its work on interoperable digital administration. But practice and public communication haven't met: PM² hasn't generated the kind of visible, shared body of experience found in the standards and methodologies mentioned above (PRINCE2, IPMA, PMBOK).

The conversation about EU's own methodology is missing exactly where it's needed most: the everyday reality of EU-funded projects.

Why is this troubling?

The gap is particularly surprising because it has nothing to do with PM² being weaker or harder to apply than the alternatives — if anything, the opposite is true. Where PRINCE2, IPMA, or PMP certification costs the individual hundreds or thousands of euros, PM² is open and free, and certification fees are low. The methodology is also deliberately lightweight and practical — not a heavy, certification-centric framework, but a set of parts designed to fit together seamlessly and be adopted as a coherent whole.

Open tailorable templates support PM² customization, making it easily applicable to both small development projects and large programs.

In addition, the methodology is supported by an active community: the PM² Alliance and its regional coordinators. This spirit is also strongly reflected in the PM² Alliance Manifesto.

Perhaps the most striking, though, is that PM² was designed from the outset to match the EU's own governance logic and language — whereas PRINCE2, IPMA, and PMBOK are general-purpose methodologies not directly applicable to EU projects. For an organisation delivering an EU-funded project, PM² should be the logical methodology — yet it's the one least talked about. That points to a gap in awareness rather than in quality: this is a communication gap, not a substance gap.

Where to turn for support?

Finnish project professionals working on EU-funded projects have no reason to worry. PM² isn't competing with PRINCE2, IPMA, or PMP for popularity — it complements them, and it has one distinctive advantage: it was designed from the outset for the EU environment and the governance logic of EU-funded projects. Until now, nobody had written about it comprehensively in Finland.

But now that's changing (see the blog). Finland has also recently gained its own PM² Alliance -certified PM² Trainer acting as regional coordinator. In other words, the necessary building blocks are already in place.

Summary

Having reviewed both the blogs of Finland's leading PM organisations and adoption examples from Finland's neighbouring countries, I found almost no publicly documented, concrete discussion of PM². The EU's own methodology — arguably the most logical choice for EU-funded projects — has stayed in the shadow of PRINCE2, IPMA, and PMBOK, even though the methodology's own strengths would suggest the opposite. This is a genuine opportunity for the community to build Finnish-language expertise in a space nobody else is covering yet.

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