Part II: Your Essential Project Actions

Given the deliverables and phases you identified in Part I, what actions must you take to get the project done effectively? This section provides a review of essential PM (project management) processes as identified in the Project Management Institute’s PMBOK (Project management Body of Knowledge).¹¹ In addition, we provide a list of essential PM actions derived from those processes from which you may select those most applicable to your project.

Project Management Processes

In Part I we identified three important whats related to the project:

•   What are the deliverables to be created?

•   What are the phases by which we will organize the project?

•   What is our overall project life cycle?

Now it’s time to consider some of the hows related to the project:

•   How will we move from phase to phase within the project?

•   How should the project manager determine specific assignments and “to dos” for the project team?

•   In short, how will we take action to complete the project?

The answers to these “how” questions may be found by examining the essential project management processes.

A process may be defined as a series of actions designed to bring about specific results.¹² There are five processes that should be applied to each phase of a project in order to bring about the completion of the phase. These processes are listed below:¹³

•   Initiating

•   Planning

•   Executing

•   Controlling

•   Closing

Three of these processes (planning, executing, and controlling) apply to any type of management activity, whether it involves a project or an ongoing operation. Since projects are temporary (i.e., they have an identifiable starting point and require timely completion), they must also include the processes of initiating (starting up) and closing (formally accepting the results and ending the phase).¹⁴

Note that all of these processes eventually become unconscious habits of effective project managers. Through practicing them in a conscious way at first, you can eventually internalize them and begin to move among them in a fluid way, helping to ensure your project’s success.

The diagram shown below illustrates how these project management processes are linked.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these processes.

FIGURE 1: Project Management Processes¹⁵