The “nuts and bolts” of a project.

Areas of Responsibility

There are four major areas of responsibility for a project manager:

1. Identify requirements for project: Get project details, figure out what it will take to make the project a success.
2. Establish objectives that can be achieved: Plan goals that the team will work toward and the way in which you’ll achieve them – agreement on goals essential so they’ll make
   decisions that help each other succeed.
3. Balance scope, time, and cost: Track how the project is doing compared to the planned schedule, budget, and quality requirements. Anytime a change is made that affects one of those three factors, the other two are affected as well.  Therefore, they’ll always need to be managed together.  Remember, a project is successful when it delivers what was promised on time and on budget.
4. Satisfy everyone’s needs: Communicate with everyone who is affected by your project.

Project Management Process Groups

Process Groups contains all 44 processes inherit within all projects and serve as an efficient mechanism for managing the project.

• Initiating: Includes processes to create and define a preliminary version of your project’s scope.
• Planning: Where you plan for how you’ll manage all aspects of the project (scope, risk, time, cost, quality, etc).
• Executing: Where all the work gets done. All of the “output” produced in this group is monitored in the next group.
• Monitoring & controlling: Recommendations that come from comparing work to your plan and make adjustments as needed.  Looking at outputs from the executing process group and comparing them to the plan constantly helps make decisions about what to do to stay on track.
• Closing: Once work in done, you’ll need to fill out all of required paperwork so that the company will have records of what you did. You should also make sure that the team being used gets released so they can work on other projects.

Knowledge Areas

Across all the process groups, there are 9 knowledge areas that span all of the different information needed to manage the project.

• Risk: Planning for things that could happen (positive or negative) and dealing with them when they do.  Quality: Ensure that right product/service is built and done efficiently.
• Scope: Defining the work that will (and won’t) be done.  Procurement: Defining contracts and choosing a contractor to do work for the project.
• Communication: Determining communication process to ensure everyone involved has the necessary info.
• Time: Estimating how long is needed to do the project and ensuring it’s done on time.
  Integration: Keeping everybody working toward same goal and dealing with changes.
• Cost: Budgeting the project and tracking expenses.
• Human Resources: Staffing for the work and motivating them.