M is used to indicate both months and minutes.
As noted on the referenced wikipedia page for ISO 6801 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso8601#Durations
To resolve ambiguity, "P1M" is a one-month duration and "PT1M" is a one-minute duration (note the time designator, T, that precedes the time value).
Using: PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.19
// For 3 Months
$dateTime = new DateTime;echo $dateTime->format( DateTime::ISO8601 ), PHP_EOL;
$dateTime->add(new DateInterval("P3M"));
echo $dateTime->format( DateTime::ISO8601 ), PHP_EOL;
Results in:
2013-07-11T11:12:26-0400
2013-10-11T11:12:26-0400
// For 3 Minutes
$dateTime = new DateTime;echo $dateTime->format( DateTime::ISO8601 ), PHP_EOL;
$dateTime->add(new DateInterval("PT3M"));
echo $dateTime->format( DateTime::ISO8601 ), PHP_EOL;
Results in:
2013-07-11T11:12:42-0400
2013-07-11T11:15:42-0400
Insert a T after the P in the interval to add 3 minutes instead of 3 months.