The Project Integration Management Knowledge Area includes the processes and activities needed to identify, define, combine, unify, and coordinate the various processes and project management activities within the Project Management Process Groups. In the project management context, integration includes characteristics of unification, consolidation, articulation, and integrative actions that are crucial to project completion, successfully meeting customer and other stakeholder requirements, and managing expectations. Integration, in the context of managing a project, is making choices about where to concentrate resources and effort on any given day, anticipating potential issues, dealing with these issues before they become critical, and coordinating work for the overall project good. The integration effort also involves making trade-offs among competing objectives and alternatives. The project management processes are usually presented as discrete components with well-defined interfaces while, in practice, they overlap and interact in ways that cannot be completely detailed in theory.

The need for integration in project management becomes evident in situations where individual processes interact. For example, a cost estimate neeed for a contingency plan involves integration of the planning processes described in greater detail in the Project Cost Management processes, Project Time Management processes, and Project Risk Management processes. When additional risks associated with various staffing alternatives are identified, then one or more of those processes must be revisited. The project deliverables also need to be integrated with ongoing operations of either the performing organization or the customer’s organization, or with the long-term strategic planning that takes future problems and opportunities into consideration.

Integration is primarily concerned with effectively integrating the processes among the Project Management Process Groups that are required to accomplish project objectives within an organization’s defined procedures.

The integrative project management processes include:

1. Develop Project Charter - developing the project charter that formally authorizes a project or a project phase.
2. Develop Preliminary Project Scope Statement - developing the preliminary project scope statement that provides a high-level scope narrative.
3. Develop Project Management Plan - documenting the actions necessary to define, prepare, integrate, and coordinate all subsidiary plans into a project management plan.
4. Direct and Manage Project Execution - executing the work defined in the project management plan to achieve the project’s requirements defined in the project scope statement.
5. Monitor and Control Project Work - monitoring and controlling the processes used to initiate, plan, execute, and close a project to meet the performance objectives defined in the project management plan.
6. Integrated Change Control - reviewing all change requests, approving changes, and controlling changes to the deliverables and organizational process assets.
7. Close Project - finalizing all activities across all of the Project MAnagement Groups to formally close the project or a project phase.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 1:04 am and is filed under Project Management.