Projects are Unique
In the PMBOK guide, or the Project Management Body of Knowledge guide, this is one of the greatest things that you will come across and you’ll refer to this all the time when studying for your PMP.
This shows us all of the knowledge areas down the left and this is in one point three of the PMBOK guide. Over to the right we’ve got the different process groups. What this means is that the knowledge areas we’ve got, things like Scope, Schedule, Cost, Quality such as testing or making sure that the quality is okay, communicating to our project stakeholders, getting the resources for our project, all of these things will be a part of your project management plan and they’ll be integrated into the project management plan through this overall knowledge area of project integration management.
Then as we’re going along from start to finish over on the right-hand side, we’re initiating a project initially with a Project Charter, identifying our stakeholders, and then we’re planning that project. We’re planning the scope, we’re planning the schedule, planning the cost, planning the quality, and the risks and all of that. Then we’re executing on that plan with our executing process group, monitoring and controlling it to make sure that it doesn’t go off the rails, and we’re keeping it on track. Finally we’re delivering that to the business or our customers and closing that project off, because it is a temporary thing.
There are many different things involved, there are multiple bits of information, there’s multiple ways to manage your project and there’s multiple ways to kick off a project. Multiple reasons to kick off a project, and it all that comes down to the fact that we can tailor a project in many different ways. We can use multiple different different life cycles like Waterfall or Agile. You might have co-located teams or teams all over the country and you’re doing them over Skype or video call or that sort of thing. You might be governed in a different way so you might have a supportive project management office, a controlling or directive project management office. You might have different sponsors who might want daily reports, maybe weekly reports, or maybe they don’t want any reports at all. All of these things just change how we end up managing the project and that makes every project quite unique.