Section One: Introduction

PROJECT MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE … PLUS

Serious students and practitioners of project management are already familiar with the PMBOK^® Guide—the professional standard published by the Project Management Institute. This document provides the foundation for the study and practice of our discipline. Like most standards, it is both very detailed and very high level. That is to say, each knowledge area and process group described in the PMBOK^® Guide is described in as much detail as possible when creating a document that must, by definition, apply to all projects in all fields of endeavor. For the new project manager—or the project manager faced with a specific problem in need of a specific solution—such standards often seem frustratingly academic: far removed from the daily grind of getting the work done.

But the Guide, while of tremendous value in describing the parameters of the field, was never intended as a step-by-step manual for running a project. Instead, it functions more as an ideal, or pure, vision of project management. Meanwhile, between the vision and the reality—as the poet T.S. Eliot wrote—falls the Shadow.

Chapters 2 to 15 are designed to help you take the fundamentals of project management one step further into the sunlight. Respected expert practitioners have written chapters on the processes and knowledge areas that, rather than reiterating what you can read in the PMBOK^® Guide, will help you to apply the standards and principles of the profession. Many of these authors were themselves involved in the recent revisions of the PMBOK^® Guide. In addition, supplemental readings related to many of the knowledge areas have been provided. Some of these readings are classics from the earlier editions of this handbook, while others were specially created to bring the reader up to date on issues and applications related to that knowledge area.

Because this section of the handbook is envisioned as a companion to the PMBOK^® Guide, we have maintained the language of the standard, describing for example, the “inputs” to and “outputs” of the various processes, even though these terms are seldom used in practice. You probably do not think of assembling your team members as an “input” to the planning process, but perhaps thinking of it that way helps to clarify the importance of this process step. Likewise, outputs are more commonly referred to as “deliverables”—the documents and results that we complete and pass along to keep the project rolling or finish it up.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the project management profession, and Chapter 2 provides an overview of the bodies of knowledge about it that have been amassed by various professional societies worldwide. Chapters 3–6 discuss the various processes that make up project management: initiating, planning, and controlling in particular receive a full chapter of coverage. Chapters 8–15 cover the nine knowledge areas accepted as being the basis of project management.

In a change from the second edition, Chapter 16, which discusses how to prepare for the PMI certification exam, has been moved to Section Two of the book.

Following many of the numbered chapters in Section One, supplemental readings on that knowledge area are indicated by a chapter identified by a letter. For example, while Chapter 10 covers the knowledge area of Project Cost Management; Chapter 10A provides supplemental reading on Earned Value Management.

Finally, all chapters in this section have been reviewed either by the author or by another knowledgeable party for compliance with the newest version of the PMI standard, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, Fourth Edition.