Today’s projects are frequently extremely difficult, spanning multiple geographies and time zones, with volatile and unpredictable requirements. Project management has become more complex than ever before as technology advances, competition soars, and customer expectations rise.
As a result, a project manager must wear many hats and juggle them all with ease! To ensure that goals and objectives are met on time and within budget, they must follow a systematic and well-structured project management plan. Project managers turn to one of the key best practices in the rule book: Project Integration Management, to stay on top of processes and synchronize all the elements involved.
What Is the Definition of Project Integration Management?
In other words, project integration management is a systematic approach to ensuring that all processes within a project are synchronized and executed efficiently and that resources stay on track to meet project objectives. It assists project managers in balancing stakeholder expectations and customer needs while optimizing tasks and resources, guiding the project to success.
This unified approach will benefit project managers who must align the work of cross-functional teams in accordance with dependencies, manage schedules, and track resources.
What Is the Importance of Project Integration Management?
A project manager is responsible for overseeing many aspects of the project, including scope, schedules, costs, and resources. He or she must avoid danger and facilitate effective communication. Clients and stakeholders must be satisfied, and quality must be ensured!
All of these disparate elements can be tracked and balanced against one another with the right integration management strategy to achieve the desired results. For example, the project scope may abruptly change, necessitating a course correction that will result in schedule delays as well as cost overruns. Things could quickly spiral out of control if no integration strategy is in place.
Here’s what integration management can accomplish:
Processes and tasks can be listed and organized.
Responsibilities can be assigned to team members.
The management of shared resources and their overlapping schedules
Work efficiency in groups is improved.
A well-crafted integration plan can ensure that all project components are in working order to improve efficiency and, as a result, productivity.
7 Project Integration Management Processes
The seven critical steps in project integration management are as follows:
Developing a project charter
Making a project management plan
Managing project completion
Project knowledge management
Controlling and monitoring project work
Change management that is integrated
Project completion
- Establishing a Project Charter
Every project begins with the development of a project charter or project document. This document will list all of the key stakeholders involved as well as the appropriate points of contact. This is a formal document that details the project’s objectives, timelines, budget, deliverables, and processes. As a result, this written blueprint will serve as a foundation for the managers to guide the project from start to finish.
- Development of a Project Management Plan
The next step in the process is to develop a master plan, which includes project deliverables, significant benchmarks, timelines, and other information needed to assess success. This is also the stage at which project managers and team leaders divide the project into smaller milestones or steps, giving it a work-breakdown structure and making it an important resource for decision making and risk management in order to control the project.
- Overseeing Project Execution
During the project execution process, the team follows the project plan by performing tasks and functions in order to achieve results on time and on budget. Managers participate in task management, stakeholder meeting implementation, communication and coordination, analysis of updates and reports, and resource management, all of which contribute to the successful integration of project functions. The ultimate goal of project execution is for every resource in the project plan and service description to be efficient and productive, with teamwork being the most important.
- Project Knowledge Management
Managers use existing information as well as new or additional information to achieve the business objectives. This integration process ensures that every member of the team knows what they need to know and when they need to know it.
The expertise gained during the project’s implementation will add to the company’s intellectual wealth. It boosts the value of knowledge exchange and fosters innovation within the organization.
- Controlling and monitoring Work on a Project
Project integration management strives to ensure that all aspects of the project are in sync, including communication, time, scope, budget, quality, personnel, risk, procurement, and stakeholders. To ensure compliance with the project management plan, the project work must be carefully monitored and directed. Managers conduct earned value analysis on a regular basis to determine the project’s budget and timeline. The project will remain operational if these are monitored and comply with the project charter.
- Integrated Change Management
Nothing is more aggravating than project changes. Managers must therefore ensure that any change request in terms of budget, term, resources, and so on is limited to the greatest extent possible. The changes must be evaluated by the change control board in order to determine alternatives and solutions. They should also consider the impact of a single change on your project. The incorporation of changes into a project’s ongoing activities is critical for positive customer delivery.
- Project completion
When the project work is finished and the results are finally accepted by the client, it is time to call it a day. There are always numerous tasks to complete in order to complete a phase or project. First, the team leaders and managers conduct a formal review of the entire project. This will define project successes, issues, and lessons learned in order to improve future opportunities. The project’s completion serves as a reference point for the implementation of subsequent projects and the rationalization of the integrated project management system.
A Project Manager’s Additional Role in Integration Management
Although project managers already have a lot on their plates, project integration management should always be a top priority. To achieve the best results, they must have the necessary technical and professional skills, as well as be well-versed in people management.
The following are some of the additional roles that project managers play in integrated management:
Integration of Project and Process
Projects are typically managed through a series of project management processes that are inextricably linked. Managers must keep track of resources and tasks that move in tandem with these processes and are aligned with project objectives. To assess process performance, project managers employ defined key performance indicators (KPIs). Furthermore, they have the intuitive ability to identify risks early on and deal with them as needed. They can deal with integrated management more effectively if they have access to reliable data.
Management of People
Project managers must be skilled at managing people and maintaining relationships, which plays a significant role in team management. The project manager’s role is to ensure that resources understand their roles, responsibilities, goals, and deadlines. The integration points and core dependencies between resources should also be determined so that the workflow runs smoothly. The exchange of information between resources is encouraged, and communication channels should be kept open at all times.
Management of Stakeholders
The importance of maintaining a healthy relationship with stakeholders is something that project managers must keep in mind. Understanding their expectations and developing appropriate strategies to meet them are part of this. The project manager must be able to deal effectively with stakeholder influences and conflicts of interest. They can accomplish this by involving stakeholders in important project decisions.
How to Achieve Success in Project Integration Management
It takes experience and a project manager with the ability to drive results on even the most complex projects to succeed at project integration management. As a result, project managers must possess a mix of soft and hard skills such as planning, communication, relationship management, leadership, critical thinking skills, data analysis, budgeting, change management, risk management, and so on.
It is critical to establish open communication channels with the team in order to ensure that information is shared on time. Appropriate impact assessments must be performed on a regular basis to identify integration points or dependencies. Using integrated management software or tools can also improve project success rates.
PMBOK 6 and PMBOK 7 Project Integration Management
The seventh edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) from the Project Management Institute (PMI)® has seen a shift in emphasis from processes to performance. While PMBOK 6 focused on 10 key Knowledge Areas, PMBOK 7 focuses on 8 Performance Domains, with integration between components as a key element that is woven into each of these domains.
Integration Management is defined as “the processes and activities to identify, define, combine, unify, and coordinate the various processes and project management activities within the Project Management Process Groups” in the PMBOK 6.
According to PMBOK 7, “Product management involves the integration of people, data, processes, and business systems to create, maintain, and develop a product or service throughout its lifecycle.”
Throughout this article, we have referred to Integration Management as defined in the PMBOK 6, which is still a useful reference for both project management practices and the 2021 PMP exam.
Conclusion
Every project is built around a number of tasks, activities, and processes that must be perfectly coordinated in order to be successful. Project integration management accomplishes this by piecing together the parts, much like a jigsaw puzzle, to form a cohesive whole. When each element of the project lifecycle is seamlessly integrated with the others—and processes and knowledge are aligned with people and resources—the project is more likely to progress smoothly and successfully.
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