6.1PM standards and process groups

The point of a project manager studying JIS Q21500 or PMBOK is not to memorize terminology or classifications. The standards serve as a shared vocabulary for diagnosing which process-group phase the project at hand is currently in, and which subject group's activity is lacking, in order to judge what to do next. What matters is not "knowing" the standard but being able to apply it to a situation.

6.1.1The five process groups

• Initiating formally authorizes the start of a project or phase and establishes the project charter. Planning works out the execution plan in detail—scope, schedule, cost, and more—and is not a one-time event; it is iterated and elaborated as circumstances change.
• Executing carries out the work per the plan and produces deliverables. Monitoring and controlling runs in parallel with executing, continuously measuring progress and performance to detect deviation from the plan and trigger corrective action. Closing finalizes acceptance of deliverables, closes out contracts, records lessons learned, and formally completes the project or phase.

6.1.2The ten subject groups and integration management

• JIS Q21500 defines ten subject groups (knowledge areas): integration, scope, schedule, cost, quality, resource, communication, risk, procurement, and stakeholder. Each subject group is a set of individual processes belonging to one or more of the five process groups, so project activity as a whole is organized along the two axes of "subject group x process group."
• Integration management is the subject group that ties together the activity of the other nine, reconciling trade-offs so the project proceeds as a coherent whole. The core role of a PM is to oversee the project as a whole and keep it coherent, ensuring that optimizing one area in isolation (e.g., shortening the schedule) does not undermine the overall objective (e.g., quality or scope); integration management is the theoretical pillar of that role.

Suppose a project manager, midway through the executing phase of a project, faces a situation where multiple stakeholders keep sending informal spec-change requests by email or verbally, and staff have been handling each one individually, letting scope gradually creep. The first diagnosis needed is "which subject group's activity is lacking," and this situation shows that integration management's integrated change control process—centrally receiving, assessing the impact of, and formally approving or rejecting change requests—is not functioning. Rather than judging each change request ad hoc as it arrives, the PM takes the corrective action of re-establishing a change control process (a single intake point for change requests, impact assessment, approval via a change control board, etc.) as a planning-phase deliverable, and routing all future change requests through it. This is a response that reinforces the "planning" subject group (the change management plan) while still in the "executing" phase—a typical example that process groups do not simply run once in sequence but are iterated and reinforced as needed. Rather than handling each individual scope change (scope management) or schedule impact (schedule management) as a local optimization within its own subject group, the PM's judgment is to manage change centrally from an integration-management perspective and keep the project coherent as a whole.

6.1.3Section summary

• The five process groups (initiating/planning/executing/monitoring & controlling/closing) form the time axis; planning iterates, and monitoring runs in parallel with executing
• The ten subject groups (knowledge areas) form the discipline axis: integration, scope, schedule, cost, quality, resource, communication, risk, procurement, and stakeholder
• Integration management is the cross-cutting role that ties together the other nine subject groups and reconciles trade-offs; integrated change control is its central process