Friday, July 15, 2011

Points to Remember: Project Integration Management

Integration Management Knowledge Area:

The Integration Management knowledge area brings all of the process groups together. A project manager has to integrate the work of everyone on the team through all of these major activities to keep the project on track:
1. Being authorized by the project charter to control the budget and assign resources
2. Planning all of the work that’s going to happen throughout the project.
3. Directing the work once it gets started
4. Monitoring the way the work progresses and looking for potential problems
5. Looking out for changes, understanding their impacts, and making sure they don’t derail the project
6. Closing out the project and making sure that there are no loose ends when it’s over

Initiating a Project:

1. The project charter officially sanctions the project. Without a charter, the project cannot begin.
2. The sponsor is the person (or people) responsible for paying for the project and is part of all important project decisions.
3. Develop Project Charter is the very first process performed in a project.
4. The project charter gives the project manager authority to do the project work, and to assign work or take control of project resources for the duration of the project. It also gives the project manager authority to spend money and use other company resources.
5. The business case tells everyone why the company should do the project. The project charter tells everyone that the project actually started, explains what it’s going to deliver, and authorizes the project manager to do the work.
6. The project charter does not include details about what will be produced or how. Instead, it contains the summary milestone schedule.
7. Two inputs to Develop Project Charter are the contract and the statement of work. The contract is what you agreed to do, although not all projects have a contract. The statement of work lists all of the deliverables that you and your team need to produce.
8. Enterprise Environmental Factors tell you how your company does business. An important one is the work authorization system, which determines how work is assigned, and makes sure that tasks are done in the right order.
9. Organizational Process Assets tell you how your company normally runs projects. One of the most important assets is lessons learned, which is where you write down all of the valuable historical information that you learn throughout the project to be used later.


Planning a Project:

1. Remember that the project management plan is formal—which means that it’s written down and distributed to your team.
2. You may get a question on the exam that asks what to do when you encounter a change. You always begin dealing with change by consulting the project management plan.
3. The work authorization system is a part of your company’s Enterprise Environmental Factors, and it’s generally part of any change control system. It defines how work is assigned to people.
4. The project management plan includes baselines: snapshots of the scope, schedule, and budget that you can use to keep track of them as they change.


Project Management Plan — Subsidiary Plans and Baselines:

The project management plan is the core of Integration Management. It’s your main tool for running a project. It consists of many subsidiary plans and baselines that will be used throughout the life of your project.

1. The scope management plan describes how scope changes are handled—like what to do when someone needs to add or remove a feature to a service or product your project produces.
2. The requirements management plan describes how you’ll gather, document, and manage the stakeholders’ needs, and how you’ll meet those needs with the project deliverables.
3. The schedule management plan shows you how to deal with changes to the schedule, like updated deadlines or milestones.
4. The cost management plan tells you how you’ll create the budget, and what to do when your project runs into money problems.
5. The quality management plan deals with problems that could arise when a product doesn’t live up to the customer or client’s standards.
6. You use the human resource plan to deal with changes in your staff, and to identify and handle any additional staffing needs and constraints you might have in your specific project.
7. The communications management plan lists all of the ways that you communicate with your project’s team, stakeholders, sponsors, and important contacts related to the project.
8. The risk management plan is about detailing all the bad things that might happen and coming up with a plan to address each risk when and if it occurs.
9. The procurement management plan focuses on dealing with vendors outside of your company.

There are three baselines in the project management plan.

1. The scope baseline is a snapshot of the scope, which helps you keep track of changes to the work that you’ll be doing and the planned deliverables you’ll be building.
2. The schedule baseline does the same for the project schedule, and
3. The cost performance baseline does the same for the budget.


The Monitor and Control Phase of a Project - Up Close

1. You start with information about how the work is being performed.
2. Next you figure out any changes that have to be made to the plans, and repairs that have to be made to the deliverables. Here, you let stakeholders know about the changes, and make sure everyone is in the loop with what you’re doing.
3. Once the changes and repairs are approved by the CCB, you send them back to the team to put them in place.

A change control board (CCB) is a group of people—usually including the sponsor—that approves or rejects changes. Any time a change goes through Integrated Change Control, the CCB decides whether or not it should be made. When they approve the change, you send it on to the team to implement.


Points to Remember - Other Topics:

Introduction to Projects & Project Management
Relationship Between Knowledge Areas & Process Groups
Project Scope Management
Project Time Management
Project Cost Management
Project Quality Management
Human Resource Management
Project Communication Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Ethics & Professional Responsibility

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