2.1 Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK )

Project management made a great leap forward in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the CPM and the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). PERT was developed in 1958 as a joint effort between the United States Navy and the Booz, Allen, Hamilton consulting firm for the Polaris submarine project. These methods were enabled by the advent of computers and were successful in managing the Apollo project to put people on the moon (surely one of mankind s finest hours), as well as many large defense projects.

PCs have brought sophisticated computer-scheduling techniques to everyone s desk. Cost-schedule control systems have increased the complexity of these systems. However, there has been little progress in improving the success rate of projects and less innovation in the underlying basis and system. People continue to work with project-management assumptions conceived forty years ago.

Figure 2.2 illustrates the related knowledge areas identified in the PMBOK Guide. This text focuses on and proposes changes to the project-management knowledge elements to impact the necessary conditions for project success. These are project integration management, project scope management, project time management, and project-risk management. You must address the other knowledge areas to varying degrees, depending on your projects and the environment in which you work.

Figure 2.2: The PMBOK areas identify the project system.

The PMBOK Guide describes general processes for each of the knowledge area, collected into five types of processes:

1. Initiating;

2. Planning;

3. Controlling;

4. Executing;

5. Closing.

These process phases...