Overview

The Project Integration Management Knowledge Area includes the processes and activities needed to identify, define, combine, unify, and coordinate the various processes and project management activities within the Project Management Process Groups. In the project management context, integration includes characteristics of unification, consolidation, articulation, and integrative actions that are crucial to project completion, successfully meeting customer and other stakeholder requirements, and managing expectations. Integration, in the context of managing a project, is making choices about where to concentrate resources and effort on any given day, anticipating potential issues, dealing with these issues before they become critical, and coordinating work for the overall project good. The integration effort also involves making trade-offs among competing objectives and alternatives. The project management processes are usually presented as discrete components with well-defined interfaces while, in practice, they overlap and interact in ways that cannot be completely detailed in the PMBOK Guide.

The need for integration in project management becomes evident in situations where individual processes interact. For example, a cost estimate needed for a contingency plan involves integration of the planning processes described in greater detail in the Project Cost Management processes, Project Time Management processes, and Project Risk Management processes. When additional risks associated with various staffing alternatives are identified, then one or more of those processes must be revisited. The project deliverables also need to be integrated with ongoing operations of...