Foundation Topics
Understanding the vision and purpose of a project is the key to successful planning, and communicating the vision and purpose of a project regularly is the key to successful implementation.
Every project needs to have a purpose and needs to align with the strategic direction of the organization. If it does not, you need to ask, “Why are we doing this project?”
In this chapter, we discuss the initiation and integration elements of projects and how the project manager must balance the constraints, processes, and needs of stakeholders so that project success can be achieved.
We first discuss the initiation of the project and describe the major artifacts for starting a project. We then move on to the planning of a project and discuss the many artifacts that constitute the project management plan. We also discuss the aspects of executing a project to achieve project success before finally moving on to the monitoring and controlling aspects of integration management.
All of these processes appear in the PMBOK® Guide, Sixth Edition, knowledge area of integration management, so let’s begin with integration management.