Development Cooperation Handbook/Designing and Executing Projects/Project Integration

The 9 Topic Areas Of Project Management Knowledge

Integration is one of the 9 topic areas of project management knowledge.

Task of the Project Integration Management is to describe and organize all "processes and activities needed to identify, combine, unify, and coordinate the various process and project management activities within the Project Management Process Groups". One has to initiate a project, one has to plan the project, one has to execute the planned activities, one has to monitor and control the activities and results, and finally one has to close the project. And in all those phases one has to fulfill tasks concerning different aspects, which must be integrated into the big picture. Hence "Integration 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" (comp. PMBOK3, p. 77).

In the development sector every new project comes to life in the context of the existing social and political environment. When designing and implementing a project destined to have a social and economic impact, it is important to understand the other forces at work that will influence how the project deliverables will help in achieving the overall programme objectives and will lead towards the expected programme impact.

Forecasting and generating synergy between the project activities and the other social, policy, cultural and economic factors operating in the project environment can be the elements that decide the usefulness or not of the project. . It is important that people working on a project discover early in its lifecycle what its dependencies are, what services and resources are available, and how to integrate with them appropriately.

Who does Project Integration?

The project manager, as part of doing project planning, should identify key areas with which the project must integrate. Actual integration work will typically be done by project team members working with suppliers of infrastructure services, external application services, or other resources. Since integration by definition is about the connections between your project and things outside of it, negotiation about where integration work happens, and who does it, is necessary and important