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An area of knowledge is, according to PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), "an identified area of project management defined by its knowledge requirements and described in terms of its processes, practices, initial data, results, tools and techniques that compose them. " In fact, all project management processes contained in the PMBOK are divided into 10 areas.

Start integrating the components of your projects with ITM Platform and keep control over activities, resources, costs, suppliers, customers, risks and much more.

In addition to the famous 6 phases of project management, the PMBOK contains 10 areas of knowledge:

Project integration
Project scope management
Project time management
Project cost management
Project quality management
Project Human Resource Management
Project Communication Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Project Stakeholder Management

In this article, we review the first area of knowledge: Project integration.

The management of PMBOK project integration brings together the processes and activities necessary for the project to exist beyond its parts. Without integration, the project is nothing more than a value proposition with a goal; Once the components are identified and defined to integrate them around the scope to be produced, the project is sufficiently defined to be accepted.

Integration, however, should not be confused with initiation: in fact, it is a beginner's mistake to integrate the components only when defining the project: integration must be maintained throughout the project life cycle, along with the six management processes in this area of knowledge.

The 4 keys to improvement in this area of knowledge are:

Gain acceptance

Create an attack plan

Be willing to make concessions and rectifications

Learn from mistakes and successes in project closure

Obtain acceptance

Integration management will be effective if we gain the support of all team members and, above all, stakeholders. Getting acceptance from the start of the project ensures that we have the support and funding to succeed. To do this, we start by creating a Project Plan and a Preliminary Reach Statement.

The Project Plan marks the beginning of the project and includes the necessary approvals and corrections. In addition, it authorizes the project manager to direct and organize the resources, which will be reflected in this letter, being well defined in their roles and responsibilities.

In the Preliminary Scope Statement we indicate the scope of the project, we define the reasons for undertaking this initiative, the objectives, the possible limitations, the possible solutions and identify the important stakeholders affected by this project. This document defines the project itself, as well as the strategy that must be followed for the change control process.

With these two documents we will be able to guarantee that the resources are coordinated and programmed in the form and time that are needed.

Create an attack plan

We begin by identifying the activities that will be necessary to effectively execute, manage and monitor the project. It will be necessary to have a project management software that allows for planning and supervision of the project at any time and from anywhere.

With a Gantt, we can visualize the project tasks and the assigned resources. In addition, we will get daily status updates, necessary to effectively manage the project.

As the project progresses, so that reporting and monitoring among all team members is more accurate and timely, we should emphasize that everyone updates the completion status of their tasks. Otherwise, its use is very easy and intuitive.

Be willing to make concessions

One of the biggest challenges that we will face in implementing the project is the management of people. The interests and opinions may be overlapping between managers of different departments and on multiple occasions they may ask to make changes in the planning of our project.

For us to be effective we must be willing to make concessions, although we may not always be able to give them what they ask of us. Above all is the project, which must meet the objectives and requirements set out in the Project Plan.

We must ensure that the team is doing its part of the project correctly and make sure that the work is completed according to the requirements in the Preliminary Reach Statement. We must monitor and control project work by measuring and balancing project progress; and carrying out corrective or preventative actions, to ensure compliance with all objectives.

It is important that we follow the established process for change control as defined in the Preliminary Reach Statement, and when a change request is made, make sure it goes through the appropriate channels before it becomes part of the plan.

Each change request must be evaluated individually and we would only implement validated and approved changes that will help us to achieve the project objectives.

Learning from mistakes and also successes

At the beginning of the project we clearly defined all the activities, and at the end of the project all we have to do is verify that the activities are all completed and that the final product or service meets the expectations of the client and the interested parties. It is desirable that we obtain written approval of the completion of the project.

Once the project is finished, it is about learning from any mistakes and successes. We organize a formal meeting with the team members and have a brainstorming session, listing one by one all the errors observed during the project. We also make a list of things that went well.

The weaknesses that we have encountered, the threats of the environment suffered, the strengths that we have detected as a team and the opportunities that we have known or did not take advantage of, everything learned in this experience, will serve us for the next project in which we will be more effective.

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In the daily on-goings of any organization, one usually lives too close to the day-to-day operations to deal with great processes of change. When these are explicitly stated, they are usually translated into methodological aspects of change management, such as communication plans, risk mitigation or stakeholder analysis.

Change management is an area of highly formalized management. When there are high degrees of formalization, it is easy to get lost in standardized procedures and lose sight of the purpose of change.

Learn how to cope with change from real success experiences

In addition, it is a comfortable approach, which we are accustomed to and that supposedly achieves good results.

However, it is less frequent to carry out a more in-depth analysis that looks at the situation in perspective and asks questions such as what is the company doing, what is it giving to customers or what do they expect from our work, from the dissonances that are identified, to reorient the work of the organization.

In short, we usually define our daily activity and that of our company based on what we do, but we do not consider what the company's own existence has in its business niche, in the market, and in the world as a whole, and what we hope to contribute to society.

What would happen if, instead of understanding change as a matter of processes, we start with results?

What if, from now on instead of focusing on how the company works, we focus on why and what we do our work for?

Perhaps in this instance the change management would cease to be paralyzed by personal processes of resistance to find its energy precisely in individual change.

After all, a company is the sum of all its workers. To produce change in global management, it is easier to begin with the discipline of each employee's work, to review their motivations and their reference criteria and productivity.

Once individual change is achieved, the next step is to achieve global change, which will have greater results than those achieved as the sum of the individual change due to the emergence of new synergy benefits.

In this way, the change begins by focusing on the reorientation of each individual. Subsequently, we move on to a second phase in which the mechanisms that articulate individual changes are optimized to maximize the benefits of group work.

On the other hand, the adoption by the group of certain attitudes and work systems implies the need to adapt all parts of it, both those already in the company and those that may come in the future.

The cycle gives positive feedback, managing to maintain the effects of the change both as meaning or purpose of the work and in terms of application of concrete methodologies.

Summarized in a sentence, change management seeks to mobilize all workers individually to achieve the success of each of them, and from that, achieve global results, which in turn translate into individual changes.

Does this mean that traditional systems of customer analysis, impact, communication planning, risk management and other factors are useless?

On the contrary: all these aspects are fundamental to implement individual and company objectives, to optimize methodologies and application systems.

All improvements aimed at optimizing work processes explain how to achieve the objectives, but they will only make sense if they are framed in a context of the global and the individual aspects that can harmonize the work of the parties from the recognition of the differences in the roles of each team member.

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When evaluating different tools, soft virtues such as the ability to adapt to different situations are often overlooked.

The concept of resilience has been popularized from its origin in psychology and environmental sciences to have multiple uses.

It is said that someone is resilient when he manages to overcome adverse situations. A resilient material regains its shape when the external pressure ceases; A plant, when it survives a period of drought. A resilient organization is one that manages to reorient its business model to the pressures from the market.

However, resilience is seldom mentioned as an advantageous feature for software products that can tolerate stressful situations. Given that B2B software is reaching new degrees of specialization, it may seem strange.

Let us explain the model of Software as a Service with ITM Platform.

Let's begin to consider resilience as a priority factor when evaluating different business software alternatives, in particular SaaS solutions.

SaaS B2B software suffers from a widespread problem: adoption rates by end users. Friction is, in this sense, the biggest barrier to return on investment.

What characterizes resilient software? What does it mean to be able to tolerate and survive adverse circumstances? Somehow, the stress test moves from the user to the tool itself. In the most difficult situations for a company, such as the adoption of a new management software, the tool has features that allow it to adapt and respond positively to a variety of uses by users.

More specifically, we look at an example from the project management industry. A project management software, for example, will be resilient if:

it covers different styles, methodologies and organizational processes, without forcing specific behaviors on the part of the users that require previous training

assumes in its system the dichotomy of agile versus predictive

allows for managing operations in addition to the projects themselves

is able to coexist with the intensive use of other products in linked areas of the core business

manages to increase its value from the appearance in other software environments (e.g. apps and integrations)

In the case of ITM Platform, for example, its resilient features include, but not limited to, the following factors:

ITM Platform is a very useful tool for expert project managers, because it welcomes, in its core, most of the aspects that should be considered in the integration of projects. However, it does not require specialized knowledge, to the point that it has an excellent reception in organizations that are taking the first steps in their orientation to projects.

Instead of covering a very specific niche, ITM Platform offers a competitive combination of complete but easy-to-use features. It is not necessary to take advantage of everything the machine can do to get going.

As far as the user experience is concerned, the navigation menus opt for maximum visibility of the benefits, instead of requiring a very precise knowledge of the platform

There are multiple access routes for the most essential functions

These points are just some examples of why I consider resilience to be a very valuable principle in assessing the ease of maintaining software use when circumstances change, motivations to use software, and coexistence with other business information systems.

Jaime Capitel

Senior Content Strategist

ITM Platform

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Man-hours, also called person-hours, are the unit of measure that is used in project management to measure the efforts needed to complete a task.

1 man hour = work completed in an hour of uninterrupted effort by an average worker.

Calculating man hours is the basis for being able to measure the cost per project of each type of expert and his contribution to the result.

Start calculating the costs of all your resources by professional categories with ITM Platform

The total man hours per task is obtained by multiplying the number of people assigned to a task by the total time it takes to complete it.

Let's say, for example, that 15 workers at a metal plant and devote 10 workdays to complete an order of 800 product units.

Estimating 6 working hours per day, the total man hours is obtained from multiplying the following:

15 x 10 x 6 = 900 hours

Therefore, productivity is equal to 800/900 = 0.89 units per hour. As we know with the cost of man-hours, it is easy to calculate how the labor force contributes to the unit cost and the profitability of the product line.

In addition, this ratio can be taken as a starting point for measuring productivity improvements, introducing new processes and cutting costs.

However, in a more complex project it would also be necessary to consider that the cost of man-hours is variable, depending on the professional category to which it corresponds.

Not all team members cost the same

A requirement to be able to calculate the total labor cost of the project is to consider different hourly rates for each professional category. In an IT project, for example, it will not cost the same for one hour of a junior programmer as a senior one.

Therefore, when calculating the cost of the project from man hours, you must take into account that the multiplication of the cost must be factorized by each category:

Total cost = (CH1 x HH1) + … + (CHn x HHn)

Where CH1 is equal to the hourly cost of the professional category 1 and HH1 is the total of man hours estimated by the professional category 1.

Cost per project calculation with ITM Platform

ITM Platform allows you to calculate the costs of tasks and projects with man hours. For this you only have to define the values of 3 variables:

The professional profiles of your organization

The fees associated with each professional profile

Standard costs, which will be calculated when a generic worker is assigned.

See in this tutorial how to define professional profiles, rates and standard costs in order to calculate the cost of all your tasks and projects.

Making organizational changes in any process, work methodology or project management system is, in itself, a very difficult project to manage. When it comes to internal management, the cost of a failed project is very high, so the margin of error is small. To make matters worse, the response of the people involved in the process makes it difficult to predict and difficult to design change plans that are followed closely.

In fact, it is common for any change, that is outside the organizations’ comfort zone, to cause diverse attitudes among workers and managers, making it difficult to contribute to change in a coordinated and organized way.

Some of these attitudes could be summarized in the following sentences:

"Our employees are prepared for change in the organization, there is nothing to worry about."

"Our company is different. Team members will be able to follow directions while exercising their autonomy. So it is not necessary to intervene in the management of change. They, know how to act better than anyone else."

"Things are fine as they are. The changes you want to introduce mean an additional workload that adds to what we already have, so the change cannot be positive."

"Workers do not have to be involved in change. We have not even been involved in the choice of new software tools."

All these statements can be refuted with the right arguments. Next, we are going to analyze valid arguments to answer them.

Complementary training programs

Undoubtedly, all the workers in your company are qualified for the work that they perform, so they can take care of it. However, the introduction of new working methodologies requires additional preparation and a strategic vision. So it is desirable to have complementary training programs provided by the company both before the introduction of the changes and during their implementation. These training programs achieve a two objectives at once. On the one hand, they will help the change develop properly, without undertaking useless additional work, since the appropriate orientation will allow for all the efforts and dedicated time to be oriented to achieve an efficient change according to the established plans. On the other hand, providing this training during the change will increase the motivation of the workers.

It is important to learn from real cases in other organizations

The problems that arise in your company have probably been experienced in other contexts, especially if there are similarities in market niche, economic sector, technological development, and so on. Although each company is unique, there are common situations and frequent problems, especially towards certain challenges characteristic of business development. For example, internationalization has very different resistance to change from the introduction of performance evaluation, the opening of a new line of business or the acquisition of another company. In any case, there is no alternative to the analysis of comparable cases. With change management there is no room for experimentation. The successes or failures of other organizations will help avoid mistakes and in turn gain precious time.

Conformity is the main enemy of progress

To be able to improve it is necessary to be open to change. Undoubtedly, at the beginning all changes are an additional effort, but this is necessary to increase efficiency and productivity, essential requirements to remain competitive.

Workers are the main engine of the company...

...Those in charge of taking the company forward. If they don’t feel involved or motivated with the work they do and with the company, it is a serious problem that is above the difficulties to implement a system or project management solution. Regardless of the organizational model, workers must be motivated. Of course, an adequate motivation also contributes to the success in the implementation of any work system.

So what can we do when there is resistance to change management both by managers and employees? Here are some tips:

It directs the change towards a clear improvement

It identifies the main obstacles to growth and proposes a process of change that achieves more mature and robust management, with clear benefits.

Adjust the exchange rate to your corporate strategy and culture

Before any change, it is best to evaluate exactly its magnitude and where the efforts should be directed. There is nothing worse than making "changes in change", on the fly, because it generates a sense of distrust, of not knowing exactly what is being done, and produces demotivation of employees. If they have tried to change something, this change must appear to be definitive, it must seem that it has been done right at first. Improvising will convey a lack of leadership.

Explain what change really means

Probably, in the initial moments there is a certain resistance. It is normal and is simply based on a certain fear of any change that may occur. Explaining exactly the magnitude of the changes will help to reassure employees or managers and will predispose them to accept them to the best degree.

Demonstrates the advantages of new project management systems using data

If they understand that the change is necessary and that the return will be greater once they have been applied, they will be more willing to perform the initial overexertion.

Using these tips, managing change in your company will be much simpler. What are you waiting for to give a return to your project management?

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One of the greatest challenges of a PMO is to ensure that the experiences generated within a project are extended to the rest of the organization and not lost when the project team dissolves. Even within each project, reaching a knowledge baseline explicitly shared by all key team members can be tricky.

This process of knowledge transfer is specific to project-based organizations and encounters different obstacles to those that characterize the transfer and application of knowledge in the field of R & D, for example.

Unfortunately, Project Management Offices can either leave the functions of knowledge transfer in the background or, when they recognize their importance, often do not take an in depth approa Preview ch. To address the problem in its complexity, we recommend starting from the recognition of the main obstacles that prevent the linear flow of knowledge.

According to B. H. Reich, there are 9 obstacles to knowledge transfer between projects:

1. Lessons Not Learned

The difficulties organizations have in managing their day-to-day projects, starts and ends with this issue. It is true that beyond the records of previous experiences and the guidelines for the project in question, a new and unrepeatable path is undertaken that is not possible to predict, but the lessons learned allow the team to compare and analyze the possible scenarios, as well as Learn from previous situations that made it difficult to achieve the desired results.

Unfortunately, the unrepeatable characteristic of the projects complicates the application of these lessons, which are often transferred through the personal experience of a team member. In order to scale the learning beyond the personal components, it is advisable to:

- work on document repositories that allow for identification of previous similarities

- share the most relevant lessons of projects with characteristics that are going to be repeated, either because they belong to the same line of business, have the same client, or develop in similar markets.

2. Selecting defective equipment

Even if you have a project team with all the necessary competences to deliver a result of sufficient quality, it is possible that there are competencies that are difficult to identify, especially with regards to the accumulated experience, the Know-how of the company and, in the case of projects abroad, the multicultural dimension. Added to this is the fact that whoever carries out the planning will never be an expert in all the technical aspects that must be covered, which may fail to match the requirements with the technical capacity of the team. In this case, even transfer of knowledge internally to the project can seriously fail.

3. Volatile team governance

On this occasion, this is a problem related to project governance. The loss of a member of the governance structure that has a direct bearing on resource orientation and corporate strategies (eg, executive sponsorship or project management) seriously compromises levels of knowledge and stability within company departments based on projects.

4. Lack of function recognition

Project governance is sustained both by management and project sponsors, who must receive the appropriate training to monitor with more discretion. The difficulty is to incorporate top management into the management of knowledge without taking away the authority and the urgency we perceive it in the danger of taking wrong directions because the sponsors may have some inaccuracy or wrong distinction in relation to the project.

5. Inadequate knowledge integration

Large-scale projects require the intertwining of expertise in a number of areas to solve complex problems, to innovate or to transform that knowledge into something greater, thanks to its correct coupling. As we commonly see, there is not a person with the exact key to fit that diverse knowledge appropriately, so there is a risk that the pieces of the puzzle will come together incorrectly, interfering with the result. Given this scenario, project management requires that the directors ensure that effective communication with and among their work teams is maintained, to achieve a successful integration of multifunctional knowledge.

6. Incomplete transfer of knowledge

Often, for the development of a complex and innovative project, that requires the implementation of resources or specialized technical support, project members must go to the suppliers of the organization or interact with a consultant. In such interactions, knowledge transfer should strive to be as transparent as possible, but fears and conflicts of interest between the project team and their knowledge provider often interfere with the process.

Most of the failures that undermine the completion of a project occur because of incomplete knowledge transfer between the team and external consultants or suppliers during design.

This is because the people from the consultancy have the aspiration to receive higher profits, for their intellectual property and recognition of value, so in the first instance they will refuse to sell their knowledge.

Consequently, during the transfer of knowledge, information that is often crucial for the success of the project is omitted and this is not usually discovered until it has failed, which encourages us to go back and evaluate the failure. It is therefore of paramount importance to ascertain the quality of the documentation received by the knowledge provider and to evaluate its quality so that the project manager can make the most appropriate decisions.

7. Loss of Team Members

The fact that a member of the team may leave due to planned or unforeseen circumstances is an intellectual leak of great value for the project, since the time that person has dedicated to the planning and / or design process involves the accumulation of knowledge and skills related to the project and that are irreplaceable. This knowledge disappears once the person leaves.

In order to protect ourselves from the knowledge gaps created by possible losses of team members who are key players for the project, preventive measures should be taken to document knowledge, in order to continue the project with new members. Of course, there will always be some knowledge that stays with the person, which will be irreplaceable.

8. Lack of a Role Awareness Map

As part of the project management, we highlight the creation of a knowledge map, grouped by role, to serve as a tool so that all members of the team (including the senior positions) can identify who knows what and what skills the team has for the project.

The knowledge map allows us to facilitate the efficient and effective approach to complex problems. Not having one translates into greater difficulties in finding the solution to a given conflict, since it involves the risk of assigning decision making to people whose knowledge is not the most suitable for the type of problem.

Theorists on the subject, such as Crowston and Kammerer, and Faraj and Sproull, have concluded that project teams with a knowledge map can be more effective, focusing mainly on the integration of knowledge.

9. Loss between phases

During the operational processes of the project, the structure and integration of the equipment varies with the passage from one phase to another, so we run the risk of losing valuable knowledge in those changes in composition or transmitting knowledge inadequately. For these cases, traditionally, one uses the techniques of written or graphic documentation, to record the knowledge of a previous phase, useful for the operations of the next phase.

However, in the written record, we often overlook data of great relevance for the optimal development of the new operational phase, such as the rationale of the design or its options. In turn, the interpretations that each team gives to documentation may be altered by the subjective criteria of its members, which leads to errors or delays, while trying to understand why certain decisions were made in the previous phase.

Therefore, as a method of knowledge management within the project management, we recommend integrating multimedia records in the documentation that complementcrucial aspects of the decision making of a phase, as well as manage mining data and networks of experts, so that it is as specific and clear as possible.