Project Management Knowledge Areas Case Study

Chapter 4: Project management knowledge areas

There are 9 major knowledge areas of project management that PMBOK describes as required expertise for all project managers. They are:

• Scope Management

• Communications Management

• Risk Management

• Human Resources Management

• Procurement Management

• Time Management

• Cost Management

• Quality Management

• Integration Management

Scope Management

Includes the processes involved in defining and controlling what is or is not included in the project; required to complete the project successfully. This process ensures that the project has identified the goals and objectives and those have been documented and that each objective has a well-defined set of indicators to monitor their progress.

To manage scope creep the project needs to establish a scope change control plan that will facilitate how, when and why any changes to the scope are made. It is a good practice for the project to define what is not included in the project, by defining what is out of scope the project stakeholders can have a better understanding of the project boundaries.

Communications Management

Includes the processes required to ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, dissemination, storage, and ultimate disposition of project information. 80% of a project managers’ time is spent communicating via reports, email, telephone, meetings and presentations.

The Communications management plan contains a list or description of all the information that needs to be communicated by the project; it identifies who will be responsible for collecting, editing and distributing the information. Distributing information goes beyond the act of sending information and includes steps to ensure the information was received and understood by the intended recipients.

Communications management also includes an analysis or evaluation of the effectiveness and relevance of the information

The first step in time management is estimating the time each one of the activities identified in the WBS would take to be completed, the relationships among the activities and the sequence they should start.

Monitoring the schedule is an ongoing task, as each activity is performed the project manager must review the progress made against the schedule baseline and determine what schedule variance have occurred, the time management plan should include instructions on how to proceed when schedule variances occur.

Another element of time management is the procedure to control schedule changes and define who can authorize changes to the schedule.

Schedule reporting includes techniques to compare the project baseline with the actual dates and uses variance analysis to determine project progress, if the project is behind schedule then the project manager must determine the best options to bring the project back to