Project Integration Management
"Integration includes characteristics of unification, consolidation, articulation and integrative actions that are crucial to project completion, successfully managing stakeholder's expectations, and meeting requirements." [3]
Project Integration Management includes making decisions on resource allocation, choosing between competing objectives, alternatives and ensuring that all processes of a project run smoothly. Its outputs are the Project Charter, Project Plan and the Project Scope Statement.
The processes that are a part of this Knowledge area are:
Project Integration Management includes making decisions on resource allocation, choosing between competing objectives, alternatives and ensuring that all processes of a project run smoothly. Its outputs are the Project Charter, Project Plan and the Project Scope Statement.
The processes that are a part of this Knowledge area are:
- Develop Project Charter: Project Charter formally authorizes a project or phase giving the Project Manager authority to start applying organizational resources to project objectives. It establishes a relationship between the customer and the performing organization.
Inputs:
Enterprise Environmental Factors and Organizational Process Assets usually serve as inputs to many other Project Management Processes in addition to Develop Project Charter.
Enterprise Environmental factors: These factors include market condition, organizational infrastructure, personnel administration, governmental and industry standards.
Organizational Process Assets: These include standard processes, policies and process definitions as set by the organization. It also includes templates, change control procedures historical information and lessons learnt (project files) from previous projects.
Statement of Work (SOW): A document that describes all the products and services to be delivered by the project. It is usually based on business needs and products or services requirements.
Tools and Techniques:
Expert Judgement: This technique is often used to asses inputs of a process. The expertise and judgement is provided by a group or individual with specialized knowledge and training.
- Develop Project Management Plan: A project management plan lists all the actions that are necessary for definition, preparation, and coordination of subsidiary plans. It is built through a series of processes until project close phase and is progressively elaborated, updated and controlled.
- Direct and Manage Project Execution: This process performs activities defined in the project management plan, implement the standards, obtain and manage human as well as material/equipment resources, manage sellers and suppliers, and manage project communication channels. It includes the activity of generating project data such as cost, schedule, technical and quality progress which helps implement risk response activities and manage identified risks. This process also requires the implementation of approved changes. Approved change can be a corrective action (documented actions that should be performed in order to bring the performance of the project work in line with the plan), a preventive action (documented direction on what action to take so the probability of a negative consequence decreases) or a defect repair (recommendation to repair a defect that has been identified in a project component or just replacing the component all together. Both the identification and recommendation is formally documented).
- Monitor and Control Project Work: This process is performed throughout the life of the project. It is used to regulate, control and assess the performance of the project according to the standards written in the project management plan. Monitoring includes collecting, distributing performance information, and assessing the measurements and trends to affect process improvements. It identifies the health of the project and areas that might need special attention. Controlling includes suggesting preventive and corrective actions or re-planning. It also includes following up on action plans to make sure that the action taken has resolved the performance issue.
- Perform Integrated Change Control: This process is for reviewing change requests, approving and managing changes to deliverables, organizational process assets, project management plan and project documents. These documents need to be continuously and carefully managed and the appropriate documentation update needs to be made in case of a change. This is why, this process is conducted from the project inception to project closure. Changes can be initiated by any stakeholder, but need to approved by some authority within the project management team or some external organization. Changes need to be formally/accurately written and entered in the configuration management system which provides a standardized, effective and an efficient way to centrally manage all approved changes and baselines associated with a particular project. It provides opportunities to continuously validate and improve the project by considering the impact of the change made and also provides a mechanism for the project team to communicate all approved and rejected changes to the stakeholders.
- Close Project or Phase: This process finalizes all activities across the Project Management Process Groups to formally close the project or Phase. The project manager ensures the completion of objectives by measuring the scope against the project management plan and then goes ahead with project closure. This process also lays down procedures needed to be followed in case the project was terminated before completion.