LETTER TO THE EDITOR
By Massimo Pirozzi
Rome, Italy
24 October 2022
Dear Editor,
I believe that most of us put into practice project management via its process groups; in general, initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing process groups may be considered of fundamental importance in the project management discipline from different perspectives.
In fact, process groups are present in the project management literature from the beginning, since they were already included in the PMBOK® Guide first edition, and they continued to be present for another 25 years in the PMBOK® Guides with continuous evolutions of the processes that make them up. Consequently, more than one million (!) project managers were trained, studied and got their certifications having the process groups as a primary reference, and even a greater number (!) of project management experts and practitioners commonly used them for decades and still use them.
Moreover, the process groups are universally applicable to projects of each sector, and can be “tailored” to projects of each size and complexity. Furthermore, the process groups, in each project and/or project phase, correspond to the basic way of structuring the work of both the project managers and the project team, and the perception of what they are and represent – due to the simplicity and the clarity of their graphing – is always immediate, also in the cases of people that deal with them for the first time.
In addition, the process groups are a basic example of the commonalities between predictive and adaptive/agile approaches, since in the latter case the only difference in their practice is the possibility of including additional “structural” iterations, in the project phases, from the closing to the initiating process groups. Ultimately, for all above reasons, process groups may be considered one of the pillars of a common project management language, with consequent benefits in terms of efficacy and efficiency also in the cases of multisciplinary project teams and/or project teams that are composed of professionals in diverse organizations.
More…
To read entire Letter to the Editor, click here
How to cite this work: Pirozzi, M. (2022). On the importance of project management process groups, Letter to the Editor, PM World Journal, Vol. XI, Issue XI, November. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/pmwj123-Nov2022-Pirozzi-on-importance-of-pm-process-groups-Letter-to-Editor.pdf
