Integration and the Project Manager

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About this lesson

A critical role of the project manager is to integrate the activities of the project team members across all knowledge areas and throughout the project phases. The Project Manager is the only individual who has that scope of responsibility

Quick reference

Integration and the Project Manager

The project manager has the primary responsibility for project integration management.  The project manager is uniquely placed to be able to conduct the integration activities for a project.

When to use

Project integration starts on the first day of the project and continues through to the last.  Project managers should be conducting and directing the integration activities at all times on the project.

Instructions

Projects often consist of many activities accomplished different individuals or resources.  These must all work together to achieve the goal of the project.  For this to occur, someone must manage the integration of the scope or activities and the integration of the team or resources.  That someone is the project manager.

Although project integration management is a separate knowledge area in the PMBOK®, its purpose is to ensure all of the actions and deliverables associated with the other knowledge areas are connected and supportive of each other. The greater the project scale and complexity, the more important project integration becomes.  Many projects use shared resources to accomplish project tasks and these require integration beyond the project boundaries to negotiate for access to the resources.  These resources could be team members shared across multiple projects or physical resources such as facilities or equipment.

The project manager role is critical to integration since the project manager is the only individual on the project who is expected to see both the overall “big picture” of the project goal and all the details that are being accomplished by all the team members.   For this reason, the project manager needs to have strong project risk analysis skills to recognize and respond to problems while they are still small.  In addition, the project manager should be able to make decisions quickly, and yet recognize when the decision does not need to be made quickly and a better decision will be made by letting the entire team participate in the decision-making process. Finally, the project manager must be a skilled communicator in order to integrate well.  This is communication both within the team and across the organization or with other teams.

Within the teams, the project manager will do most integrating activities during planning and in ongoing team status meetings.  In these settings, integration of both task or scope occurs to ensure everything needed for a project deliverables is accomplished and integration between team members occurs to ensure smooth handoffs.

Integration across teams and the organization is normally done by the project manager who represents the needs of the project.  This will often require negotiations to find “win-win” options for all parties.  The project manager must know their project well to be an effective negotiator.  Many times this will include negotiating a project approach that achieves the project goal and supports a business function as it seeks to achieve its functional goal.

Hints & tips

  • A project manager will often feel that they didn’t accomplish much during the day except to “put out fires.”  That is what integration feels like.
  • Projects are seldom static.  The continual change in performance will often lead to a regular reassessment of risk and the need for continual change.
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  • 00:04 Hi, I'm Ray Sheen.
  • 00:05 I'd like to discuss the role of the Project Manager
  • 00:08 with respect to Project Integration Management.
  • 00:13 Let's start our discussion of integration
  • 00:15 by talking about the project management activities.
  • 00:18 Project management is all about integration.
  • 00:21 Integrating activities or tasks, and integrating team members, and
  • 00:25 of course, the project manager is leading that integration.
  • 00:28 The more complex the project, the more integration is required.
  • 00:32 In fact, virtually every aspect of the project has integration implications, and
  • 00:37 these cut across most of the project management knowledge areas.
  • 00:41 Let me illustrate.
  • 00:42 Project deliverables are created with project tasks that represent
  • 00:45 project scope.
  • 00:46 Task scope is defined in part by the quality requirements for that task,
  • 00:51 and based upon the task scope, and quality requirements estimates can be created for
  • 00:55 time and resources to accomplish the task.
  • 00:59 And each task must be integrated with other tasks, which sets a start time and
  • 01:03 a finish time for the task, and for the entire project schedule.
  • 01:07 While the actual resources that will be used to do the work must be identified and
  • 01:11 recruited onto the project team, or contracted for using project procurement.
  • 01:16 And of course, whatever resources you're using then must be paid for,
  • 01:21 which requires money.
  • 01:22 By this time there is likely some uncertainty, and
  • 01:24 one or more of the items mentioned,
  • 01:26 which means that risk management must also be integrated into the project management.
  • 01:30 And, of course, all of the plan and
  • 01:32 status must be communicated to the project team members and stakeholders.
  • 01:36 So we've just touched all of the knowledge areas, and
  • 01:40 integration is needed to keep each of those in sync.
  • 01:43 Now that we've demonstrated that integration is needed in
  • 01:46 effective project management,
  • 01:48 let's look at the role of the project manager in performing this integration.
  • 01:52 The project manager is the integration leader.
  • 01:55 That individual is the person at the center of the project activities.
  • 01:59 As the leader of the project team he or she is integrating the actions and
  • 02:02 activities of the team members.
  • 02:04 The project manager, as the keeper of the project plan,
  • 02:07 is also directing the integration of all the plans and actions, and
  • 02:11 all the elements of each project management knowledge area in the project.
  • 02:15 Further, the project manager is normally the person interacting with
  • 02:18 the stakeholders, and
  • 02:19 integrating the project activities within the rest of the business operation.
  • 02:24 Another thing that project managers are often facing as part of their integration
  • 02:27 is balancing the big picture or goal of the project,
  • 02:30 along with the details that are occurring at any given time.
  • 02:34 Key skills for a project manager would include the ability to quickly assess
  • 02:38 a situation to understand if there is risk, and
  • 02:41 the nature of that risk, then the ability to make decisions, either personally, or
  • 02:46 to quickly facilitate a team decision, or both.
  • 02:49 And of course the project manager must be an excellent communicator,
  • 02:52 as they're the ones communicating both within the team and
  • 02:55 with stakeholders who are not part of the team.
  • 02:57 Well, I focussed so
  • 02:58 far on the integrating role of the project manager within a project.
  • 03:02 Now let's look beyond the project boundaries.
  • 03:05 Many projects are cross functional projects.
  • 03:08 So project team members often have functional goals and
  • 03:11 objectives in addition to project goals.
  • 03:14 The project manager will often be called in to negotiate a compromise,
  • 03:17 especially if there is conflict between two different functions.
  • 03:20 In addition, in many organizations projects are using shared resources, so
  • 03:26 the project managers of the affected projects need to negotiate and
  • 03:29 integrate the shared resource in order to make the best use of those resources.
  • 03:34 And this could be either physical resources like equipment or facilities, or
  • 03:38 shared personnel who are assigned to multiple projects.
  • 03:41 When an organization has multiple projects occurring at the same time,
  • 03:45 there will inevitably be occasions when the projects interfere with each other.
  • 03:49 At that time,
  • 03:50 the project managers should work together to find the optimal solution.
  • 03:54 That will involve negotiation and integration between the projects.
  • 03:58 The project manager needs to know the current state of their project, and
  • 04:02 be able to predict the schedule and the risk impact of proposed compromises.
  • 04:06 If every negotiation requires the project manager to run back to the team and
  • 04:11 ask for permission to make a change, the process will quickly become unmanageable,
  • 04:16 and the project manager will become ineffective.
  • 04:20 Well as you can see,
  • 04:21 integration is integral to the role of project management.

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