SECTION ONE

The Project Management Body of Knowledge: Comprehension and Practice

Introduction

FOUNDATIONAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE

Serious students and practitioners of project management are already familiar with the PMBOK^® Guide—the professional standard published by the Project Management Institute (PMI). 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 in the PMBOK^® Guide is described in as much detail as possible when creating a document that, by definition, must 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 and 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 17 are designed to help you take the fundamentals of project management one step further into the sunlight. Respected expert practitioners discuss 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.

Chapter 1 offered an overview of project management, its history and working parts. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the bodies of knowledge about project management that have been amassed by various professional societies worldwide. Chapters 3 to 7 discuss the processes that make up project management; in particular, initiating, planning, monitoring and controlling, and closing each receive a full chapter of coverage. Chapters 8 to 17 cover the ten knowledge areas accepted as the basis of project management.

Chapters that in previous editions appeared in this section as supplemental readings have been moved to the relevant sections later in the book or, in some cases, deleted.

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, Fifth Edition.