Subtitles of the Movie

Now that your memory has been refreshed on what a project lifecycle consists of, we will continue our PMBOK Guide Overview through a review of the process groups, which is our focus for this movie. There are a total of five process groups: initiating, where the project or project phase is defined and authorized. Here our objective is to develop the project charter and also to assign a project manager; planning, where the objectives are defined, refined and the planning of the project takes place. Some of the objectives of this group include developing the project management plan, creating the WBS and identifying the risks, executing where the project work is carried out. Objectives here include completing the work defined within the project management plan, coordinating and managing resources, implementing approved changes and distributing information; monitoring and controlling which regularly monitors and measures progress and identifies ways to correct variances and closing, where the formal acceptance of a product, service or a result takes place. The processes within these process groups do at times interact and often they rely on the result of other processes to begin or to carry out their purpose. This is also why we see that they are grouped together. The initiating process group contains two process: develop project charter and develop preliminary project scope statement. The planning process group contains the highest number of processes at 21. Here is where we develop the plans that encompass the project management plan. This includes things like the project schedule, risk management, budgets and so forth. And here's a look at the processes within the executing process group. As previously mentioned, these processes share the purpose of carrying out the project work outlined in the planning stage. Monitoring and controlling is our second largest process group. As you have seen, a large amount of effort goes into the planning of the project and there is a lot to monitor to ensure that the project remains on course and this is why we see so many processes here in this group. And finally, our closing process group contains two processes. These processes are concerned with the closing of not just the project, but also on a smaller scale, the individual project phases. There is a document in your work files that you also received during PMBOK Part 1 called Process Overview. You can use this document as a guide to remembering the process group that the processes belong to. You will also see something called Knowledge Areas within that document. It's located on the first left-hand column. We'll review knowledge areas in the next movie. Something else I'd like for you to keep in mind is that these processes do not occur in the order shown in this document. As you may recall, I mentioned that there are processes that rely on the ending results or outputs of other processes in order to get started so there are several processes that will need to occur in a particular order. However, this is not the case for all and depending on the size of the project, not all of these processes may take place within a project phase or even within a project. The project team must make this decision depending on the influencing factors surrounding the project and again, depending on the size and the complexity of the project. And with that, we'll wrap up this brief overview of the process groups. For those taking the exam, it'll be important to know these process groups and to recognize the processes within them. As I mentioned a few times during Part 1 of this course series, it'll greatly benefit you to memorize the process overview diagram. Next, we will move on to our review of the nine knowledge areas.