How can you become an effective project manager? There’s a precise answer by considering the project management knowledge areas outlined in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). The Project Management Institute (PMI) wrote PMBOK as a compilation of the core ideas of project management for aspiring candidates.
What Are the Different Types of Project Management Knowledge Areas?
Project managers need to keep an eye on what are known as the “Project Management Knowledge Areas” in order to successfully plan, organise, track, and deliver projects with the support of the project team and project stakeholders.
A project is made by following a pattern called the Project Cycle. The Project Cycle further consists of the five phases of Project Management. The five phases of a project’s life cycle are:
- Initiation
- Planning
- Execution
- Monitoring/controlling.
- Closure
Each of these needs the attention of one or more of the knowledge areas mentioned later in this blog post. The PMI’s PMBOK categorizes all projects into these distinct but sequential stages.
These project phases can be the context in which the PMBOK knowledge areas are used. In this model, the knowledge fields are vertical, whereas the project groups are horizontal. The knowledge domains represent the essential technical expertise required for successful project management. Further in this blog, you will get to know more details about the Project Management Knowledge Areas.
10 Key Knowledge Areas of Project Management
The project management plan, which incorporates details from all these processes, covers the expertise required to successfully carry out a project. A summary of the essential project management areas consisting of each of the 10 knowledge areas of project management is provided below.
1. Project Integration Management
In its simplest form, project integration management comprises the process through which project managers coordinate all relevant activities, resources, stakeholders, changes, and other project factors that affect the output of a project. To ensure that effective project integration management practices are in place, project managers can employ a variety of instruments and tools. The project management plan, for instance, is crucial in ensuring a smooth integration process because it lays out the steps needed to complete the project successfully. After the project management team creates a strategy and gets it approved by stakeholders and/or sponsors, they keep tabs on its progress.
The classroom training as well as the online course training for project management by ProThoughts makes it the go-to place for learning how to manage a project. It allows project managers to build a plan, monitor project management knowledge areas, and engage with their teams from anywhere in the world. You can plan, schedule, and monitor your projects online with helpful views, such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and other calendars. ProThoughts also includes teaching the candidates how to report capabilities, allowing managers to generate reports for communication and distribution to project stakeholders.
Directing and managing the project’s activity, which entails the creation of the project’s deliverables, is also part of the project integration area. Any potential deviations or issues in this process are tracked, analyzed, and reported.
You can also implement any necessary change management. Getting buy-in from key players, sponsors, and possibly even another administrator may be necessary. The last phase of any project includes wrapping up this section as well.
2. Project Scope Management
One of the most crucial areas of expertise in project management is scope management. Scope management is the process of keeping track of all that has to be done for a project to be successful. Defining what will be accomplished in the project can be done by creating a project scope management plan.
Writing a scope statement is the first step in developing a strategy for scope management. This statement can be as short as a line or as long as a bulleted list, but it should be thorough enough to mitigate even the most severe threats to the project’s success. Another side of this field is the work breakdown structure (WBS), a graphical representation of the various tasks that make up a project.
During the project’s duration, validate the scope by ensuring the sponsor or stakeholder routinely approves the deliverables. This happens in the organizations responsible for monitoring and supervising the process, and it’s all about approving the actual results rather than any idealized blueprint drawn up in advance.
To maintain control over the project’s scope, the scope statement will likely evolve as the work progresses.
3. Project Time Management
Estimating how long a project will take, making a timetable, and monitoring the team’s progress toward that schedule are all aspects of project time management. The first step is to determine the scope of your project so you know what activities to include in your plan.
We arrange the tasks included in the project in a sensible sequence, considering their interdependencies. Then, we decide if these dependencies start-to-start (SS), start-to-finish (FF), or finish-to-finish (SF).
More extensive projects typically benefit most from this.
Now that the tasks are in order, we can determine how much time and money we’ll need to complete the project. At this time, we also settle on how long each activity will take. One must first identify the tasks’ essential paths and float times to create a timetable. Project management tools like Gantt charts, kanban boards, and calendars can help you organize your tasks over time. Then you can focus on resource leveling to ensure everything is used effectively.
After establishing the timeline for a project, it is necessary to have control plans for its timeline. Regular checks of earned value management ensure that we carry out the actual strategy as intended.
4. Project Cost Management
To build a project budget, this area of project management expertise comprises cost estimation. Using cost-estimating tools and methodologies ensures that we have a sufficient budget to cover the project’s costs and that we closely track it to keep stakeholders or sponsors up-to-date.
The cost management plan will outline the budgeting process, including how and if it will change and what methods will regulate it, just as it will for other areas of project management. You must estimate the time and money needed to execute each project activity, and this requires accounting for all resources involved.
5. Project Quality Management
Even if a project completes on schedule and budget, it may still be considered unsuccessful if the quality falls short. Therefore, quality management is essential to each project manager’s toolkit. You must outline the parameters for quality control and assurance in your project’s quality management plan.
As a result, quality control entails inspecting outputs to guarantee they conform to the quality management plan’s specifications.
6. Project Human Resource Management
The following image is from the PMBOK guide itself. It shows Project Resource Management.
Your project team is your most valuable asset, so recruiting the best people possible and keeping them satisfied throughout the project is critical. But you also need to monitor their output to ensure the project is progressing as expected. Positions, their responsibilities, and their place in the larger project framework can all be found in the HRM plan.
Following establishing roles, it is time to recruit a project team. This can be accomplished internally through a combination of staff reassignment and new recruitment. The group needs refinement, in the form of training and other resources, to be effective in their project roles.
The project manager is responsible for overseeing the team at all times. Everyone is happy because the team’s productivity is tracked, and there are no disagreements among members.
7. Project Communications Management
Communication management may be the most crucial part of project management because it affects every other facet. Communications management planning is essential since it informs the team and stakeholders of the project’s progress.
At this stage, we make decisions about the frequency and mode of message dissemination. Pay attention to who needs something and when. Keep in mind that you will utilise the channels of communication when project concerns and adjustments arise.
Control the flow of information during the project’s actual execution. As part of this process, it’s vital to maintain command over your communications by monitoring and modifying them as necessary.
8. Project Risk Management
Management plans detail how such risks will be identified, classified, and prioritized. Preventing mishaps from happening while carrying out the project requires compiling a list of potential threats.
You should conduct a qualitative risk analysis after you have identified and categorized the significant risks based on likelihood and impact. Afterward, arrange them by importance. Then, conduct a quantitative study of how each variable will affect project metrics like cost, timeline, etc.
You must now prepare responses to any dangers. Before any potential dangers become actual problems, the organization must have a plan of action in place with an owner who can effectively identify and handle the risk. Reviewing the risk register regularly and erasing threats that are no longer relevant is an integral part of risk management.
9. Project Procurement Management
Subcontractors and other third-party services are under the extent of this section of project management expertise. Each of the prices and the schedule will be impacted. Defining the project’s external requirements and the roles of any potential contractors is the first step in planning a project’s procurement management.
Hire the contractors and go through the procurement process of creating a statement of work, terms of reference, request for proposal (RFP), and vendor selection. You need to manage and oversee the procurement process, and then you can finalize the contracts when everyone is happy with the results.
10. Project Stakeholders Management
Everyone involved in the project should feel satisfied with it. That’s why treating the project stakeholders with the same level of active management as the rest is crucial. First, conduct a stakeholder analysis to determine the individuals involved and the issues that are at the forefront of their minds. Getting started is the most essential component of any project, although it can be complicated.
Managing stakeholders now entails identifying everyone with a vested interest in the project’s outcome and ranking their concerns and potential impact on the project in order of importance. As a result, you will be able to manage stakeholders’ expectations and meet their needs through open communication lines.
The project manager must check in with each stakeholder to ensure that they meet their demands and manage stakeholder involvement throughout the project. If not, determine what requires fixing to meet those needs or lower the expectations.
With this newfound familiarity, let’s compare the project management knowledge categories with similar but distinct ideas.
What’s the difference between Project Management Areas v/s Project Management Skills
Once again, we know the project methodology based on the PMBOK as Project Management. They provide several tools for organizing and monitoring projects. Competencies in project management, such as process teams, complement the body of knowledge. For instance, many of the abilities required for project management fall under the category of hard abilities. Everything from planning to risk analysis and everything in between falls under this category of essential project management knowledge areas.
However, managing a project takes more than just technical know-how. Soft talents encompass qualities like leading effectively, communicating effectively, and working well with others. These abilities may be more challenging to instill in a person, but they are crucial to the project’s success anyway. Without problem-solving, time-management, organization, and critical-thinking skills, all the technical know-how in the world won’t lead to a successful project.
With the help of ProThoughts, you can easily apply several disciplines of project management.
Knowledge fields in project management need powerful insights throughout the project’s life cycle. You can easily plan, monitor, and keep tabs on your project’s progress in real-time with the help of the Project Insight tool through ProThoughts, a top-rated project management institute. Project managers and their teams can now complete projects on time and under budget with the help of our task management, risk management, and resource management technologies.
Analyze Tasks From Various Angles
Every project has a unique group working towards common goals with varying skill sets and approaches. Diversity is essential when implementing the various facets of project management expertise. For this reason, the Project Insight software provides project managers with flexible Gantt charts for scheduling, while teams can use task lists or Kanban boards. Timelines are an excellent way for stakeholders who aren’t experts in the field to see how things are going. Everyone working on a project can stay on the same page thanks to real-time view updates.
Watch Over Your Projects With Real-Time Monitoring
To function correctly, the knowledge domains related to project management require monitoring and control. You can’t assume that the completed project will match the plan for the project; you’ll need to analyze it and make adjustments as necessary. Thus, the Project Insight software that we provide has customized insights and includes several different tracking mechanisms. The real-time dashboard provides a high-level overview of the project, allowing you to see automatically tracked data such as time, cost, and more in straightforward graphs and charts. In addition, unlike with other software, there is no need for a time-consuming setup procedure. We offer secure timesheets to track your team’s work progress. Along with a color-coded workload chart that makes it simple to balance the workload and maintain productive teams operating at or near capacity.
Conclusion
Each of these project management sub-fields can now reveal a vast landscape. This to-do list is lengthy when taken into consideration. You may feel like you have no control over the situation. You might also wonder how you will ever get everything done on Earth.
On the other hand, if you incorporate these skills into your projects, you won’t have to deal with crisis management at all. At the least, you won’t have to deal with it as often, and you can instead move into a state of proactive problem-solving. If you put these project management concepts into practice and consistently strive to improve those principles, you will swiftly ascend to the top of the food chain.
