PMBOK Process Groups

The time-frame of the project from start from finish is called the project life-cycle.

But it is normal best practice to see the project as a series of ‘life-cycles’ – just the same way as children go through their teen years, onto adulthood, middle age, and then to senior years.

It is not the intention of this article to teach one particular methodology – but I think it important that you understand the principles so that you may use them if you wish.

It is important to understand some key elements here.

All projects are split into PHASES or STAGES. These are linear and at the end of each Stage, management has a chance to review the project and decide whether to go to the next Stage or Phase. You could see these as Management Stages if you will.

But the US PMBOK also describes FIVE Process Groups, and these describe the WORK of the project. If a project has several Phases, each of these Processes would occur in each Phase.

The Process Groups are:

• Initiating
• Planning
• Executing
• Monitoring and Controlling
• Closing

These Processes are generally performed during EACH Phase of a large project.

The next diagram summarizes these Process Groups:
 

Don’t get confused here, they are showing you something based on the old classic Plan-DO-Check-Act cycle. Each of the Process boxes above will lead into the next.

Remember that the Phases describe how the work for the end-product will be completed, and the Process groups organize and describe how the activities (tasks) will be completed.

Since this Toolkit has been created to teach you how to manage projects, I will not wander very far into the academic realms needed to formally study and pass an exam.

So let me simplify the above diagram…

 
 Here is how you might use these processes in a small simple project having just ONE Phase or Stage from project start to project finish. I have shown the Executing and Monitoring and Controlling processes in parallel – not strictly as one following the other.

The reason being is that in practice you start work, see how it’s going, modify it a little, see how its going….and so forth. But MOST projects will have more that one Phase or Stage, so you’d simply carry out the above for each Stage. Like this:

Let me relate this a little closer to a typical project showing actual tasks.

This next diagram shows a generic set of tasks where the project manager and the Sponsor have decided that it should be split into Stages.

The end of each Stage is chosen as a sensible BUSINESS reason to take stock of what has been done, what the future forecast is, business case viability, risks, okay, etc.

Check this out:

 Here you can see I’ve combined the ideas in PMBOK for a very simple project: