Knowledge Required To Manage Projects

by Shiv Shenoy

Courtesy:ansonlobo

In general, Project Management knowledge can be divided into 10 areas. These are specific areas that a project manager should be well-versed with – and they come into play multiple times in a project or a phase of the project.

What are these Buckets of Knowledge?

These are project manager’s ability to,

see an overall picture of how all project management activities interact and depend on each other (the overall ‘How’)
manage the project and product scope (what is to be produced?)
identify, assign, manage and control effort duration for the project activity (by when?)
identify and manage costs associated with resources and activities (what is the price?)
determine, perform and control quality as identified by the ‘correctness of project outcome to the documented requirements’ (does it meet stakeholder expectations?)
hire, develop and manage people, deal with their performance and other issues, motivate them and get them to be productive and efficient
identify communication needs of stakeholders (who should know what, when, and by which means?)
proactively assess, identify project internal and external risks and plan strategies to deal with them (what may go wrong?)
identify which part of project needs to be done/procured from outside and how to go about it (who else can do what my team cannot?)
critically identify stakeholders (who are impacted by this project?)

If you wanted some help in remembering them, here’s a mnemonic that has helped me. Either use this one, or make one of your own!

“Integrating Scope and Schedule will Cost our Quality Resources to Communicate with a Risk of Procuring Stakeholders!”.

If this didn’t make sense, it probably serves the purpose of a mnemonic – a phrase that is a bit wacky, silly or outrageous. The trick is to make it out of the ordinary so the mind remembers it easily. 🙂
Here is a mind map to understand these knowledge areas –

Figure 1: The Project Management Domain Knowledge Buckets

A quick note before we move on: as I mentioned in earlier post many a concepts and terms are repeated in these notes. This redundancy very useful to remember the concepts. The more we come across something, better are our chances of remembering them.