9 Knowledge areas that Project Manager Should be Familiar With

9 knowledge areas that project managers should be familiar with in order to be considered professionals. These are as follows.

1. Project Integration Management

Project integration management ensures that the project is properly planned, executed, and controlled, including the exercise of formal project change control. As the term implies, every activity must be coordinated or integrated with every other one in order to achieve the desired project outcomes.

2. Project Scope Management

Changes to project scope are often the factors that kill a project. Project scope management includes authorizing the job, developing a scope statement that will define the boundaries of the project, subdividing the work into manageable components with deliverables, verifying that the amount of work planned has been achieved, and specifying scope change control procedures.

3. Project Time Management

I consider this a bad choice of terms, as “time management” implies personal efforts to manage one’s time. Project time management specifically refers to developing a schedule that can be met, then controlling work to ensure that this happens! It’s that simple. Because everyone refers to this as scheduling, it should really be called schedule management. (I know, I may be booted out of PMI for such heresy!)

4. Project Cost Management

This is exactly what it sounds like. Project cost management involves estimating the cost of resources, including people, equipment, materials, and such things as travel and other support details. After this is done, costs are budgeted and tracked to keep the project within that budget

5. Project Quality Management

As I have commented earlier, one cause of project failure is that quality is overlooked or sacrificed so that a tight deadline can be met. It is not very helpful to complete a project on time, only to discover that the thing delivered won’t work properly! Project quality management includes both quality assurance (planning to meet quality requirements) and quality control (steps taken to monitor results to see if they conform to requirements).

6. Project Human Resource Management

Project human resources management, often overlooked in projects, involves identifying the people needed to do the job; defining their roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships; acquiring those people; and then managing them as the project is executed. Note that this topic does not refer to the actual day-to-day managing of people. The PMBOK ? Guide mentions that these skills are necessary but does not attempt to document them. Given that these are the most important skills that a project manager must have, the PMBOK ? Guide is deficient in omitting them.

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7. Project Communication Management

As the title implies, project communications management involves planning, executing, and controlling the acquisition and dissemination of all information relevant to the needs of all project stakeholders. This information might include project status, accomplishments, and events that may affect other stakeholders or projects. Again, this topic does not deal with the actual process of communicating with someone. This topic is also mentioned but not included in the PMBOK ? Guide.

8. Project Risk Management

Project risk management is the systematic process of identifying, quantifying, analyzing, and responding to project risk. It includes maximizing the probability and consequences of positive events and minimizing the probability and consequences of adverse events to project objectives. This is an extremely important aspect of project management that sometimes is overlooked by novice project managers.

9. Project Procurement Management

Procurement of necessary goods and services for the project is the logistics aspect of managing a job. Project procurement management involves deciding what must be procured, issuing requests for bids or quotations, selecting vendors, administering contracts, and closing them when the job is finished.

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