Certification Summary

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Project integration management is an ongoing process the project manager completes to ensure the project moves from start to completion. It is the gears, guts, and grind of project management - the day-in, day-out business of completing the project work. Project integration management takes your project plans, coordinates the activities, project resources, constraints, and assumptions and massages them into a working model.

Of course project integration management isn't an automatic process; it requires you, the project manager, to negotiate, finesse, and adapt to project circumstances. Project integration management relies on general business skills such as leadership, organizational skills and communication to get all the parts of the project working together.

The process of project management can be broken down into three chunks:

1. Develop the project plan Project plan development is an iterative process that requires input from the project manager, the project team, the project customers, and other stakeholders. It details how the project work will accomplish the project goals. The project plan provides communication.

2. Execute the project plan Now that the plan has been created it's time to execute it. The project execution processes authorizes work to begin, manages procurement, manages quality assurance, host project team meetings and manages conflict between stakeholders. On top of all these moving parts the project manager must actively work to develop the individuals on the project to work as a team for the good of the project.

Manage changes to the project Changes can kill a project. Change requests must be documented and sent through a formal change control system to determine their worthiness for implementation. Integrated Change Control manages changes across the entire project. Change requests are evaluated, considered for impacts on risk, costs, schedule, and scope. Not all change requests are approved-but all change requests should be documented for future reference.

As the project moves from start to completion the project manager and the project team must update the Lessons Learned documentation. The Lessons Learned serves as future historical information to the current project and to other future projects within the organization. The project manager and project team should update the Lessons Learned at the end of project phases, when major deliverables are created, and at the project completion.

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