Carrying out the work in the project management plan will be a focus of the PMP Certification Exam and is all about integrating the various plans and activities of the project. A lot of your time is spent analyzing information and coordinating your team members’ actions. While managing the work, you need to be flexible and nimble to respond appropriately to the day-to-day situations, issues, and risks that arise.
You will have to call on your interpersonal skills to be an effective leader. During this process, you will also be implementing approved changes to the project management plan. The process of getting changes approved is in the Monitoring and Controlling process group. After the changes are approved, they are implemented in this process.
Direct and Manage Project Work. Leading and performing the work defined in the project management plan and implementing approved changes to achieve the project’s objectives.
Notice that there are no processes in the Executing process group for scope, schedule, cost, or risk. The underlying assumption is that these are so tightly connected that they are the nexus of the Integration process of Direct and Manage Project Work.
In the start of the planning processes, you can plan your scope independent of your schedule and cost, but you can’t execute scope independent of the schedule or the budget or risk events. Therefore, you can consider this Integration process the direct intersection of those knowledge areas and all the others as well.
| Scope | Creating deliverables Meeting project requirements Providing information on deliverable status Requesting scope changes Repairing any defective products or results Implementing corrective or preventive actions regarding deliverables |
| Time | Performing activities as defined in the schedule Refining duration estimates Providing status information on the duration and forecasts for completion dates Requesting changes to the schedule Implementing corrective or preventive actions regarding the schedule |
| Cost | Committing costs Expending resources Tracking cost information Providing status information regarding expenses committed and incurred Refining cost estimates Providing forecast information for future expenditures Requesting changes to the budget Implementing corrective or preventive actions regarding the budget |
| Quality | Ensuring the quality process is being implemented as
planned Ensuring the planned quality process is effective Implementing quality audits Sharing good practices Identifying and documenting quality gaps Improving process effectiveness Requesting changes to the quality process |
| Human Resources | Acquiring project staff Training team members Managing team performance Enhancing and improving team performance Mentoring and coaching team members Providing feedback to team members Problem solving Resolving conflicts |
| Communication | Reporting work performance results Distributing information as indicated in the communications management plan Documenting and distributing lessons learned |
| Risk | Implementing risk response plans Providing information regarding risk status Managing resources assigned to risk activities |
| Procurement | Releasing procurement documents Conducting bid conferences Applying source selection criteria Awarding contracts |
| Stakeholders | Interfacing with internal and external stakeholders Managing stakeholder engagement Resolving issues |
You can see that even though there isn’t any specific information about the product, you are doing a heck of a lot of product work as well as project work! If you use this table to help you conceptualize all the work of the project, you can better understand the context of questions on the exam.