return to model

Project management is an integrative endeavor—an action, or failure to take action, in one area will usually affect other areas. The interactions may be straightforward and well-understood, or they may be subtle and uncertain. For example, a scope change will almost always affect project cost, but it may or may not affect team morale or product quality.
  These interactions often require tradeoffs among project objectives—performance in one area may be enhanced only by sacrificing performance in another. The specific performance tradeoffs may vary from project to project and organization to organization. Successful project management requires actively managing these interactions. Many project management practitioners refer to the project triple constraint as a framework for evaluating competing demands. The project triple constraint is often depicted as a triangle where either the sides or corners represent one of the parameters being managed by the project team.
  To help in understanding the integrative nature of project management, and to emphasize the importance of integration, this document describes project management in terms of its component processes and their interactions. This chapter provides an introduction to the concept of project management as a number of interlinked processes and thus provides an essential foundation for understanding the process descriptions in Chapters 4 through 12. It includes the following major sections:

	Project Processes
	Process Groups
	Process Interactions
	Customizing Process Interactions
	Mapping of Project Management Processes