Chapter 16: Project Management – The Big Picture

Well, in the previous many chapters, we have learnt a lot of basic fundamentals about Project Management, the project manager, scope, stakeholders etc etc. It would be inappropriate if we don't look at the project management as one big picture to make things clear to you.

So, lets get started!!!

The Big Picture of Project Management:

Let me start off by saying that, you might already be aware of the concepts covered in this chapter because, we have been doing that in the past many chapters. The purpose of this chapter is to give you a holistic view of how things fit in terms of project management.
Look at the picture below:

There are a total of 9 important aspects of a project and each of these aspects are managed by a different knowledge area. Remember the Project Management Knowledge Areas chapter?
Similarly, every project has 5 stages and each has its own significance. Remember the Project Lifecycle chapter?

The purpose of project management is to take care of these 9 aspects and carry out the project through these 5 stages effectively and successfully. So, project management is performed by applying processes from certain knowledge areas at certain stages of the project.

The three most important things we need to understand about Projects are::

• The project lifecycle consists of five stages, technically called process groups: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring/controlling, and closing. These process groups can be mapped to commonly known project stages: starting, organizing and preparing, carrying out the work, and closing.
• The project processes that are performed to manage projects constitute nine project management knowledge areas: communication management, cost management, human resource management, integration management, procurement management, quality management, risk management, scope management, and time management.
• A project is performed in a project environment that is shaped by many elements, such as organizational culture, organizational structure, enterprise environmental factors, organizational process assets, and the maturity of the organization.

I am really glad to say that we have covered one major chunk of the 1st part of our study related to Project Initiation. We will just summarize what we learnt in the next chapter and move on to the second part which will deal with the actual project initiation.

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