Project Management Institute, Pmi

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        Project Management Institute, PMI, is a nonprofit organization for project management. PMI provides many things some being development of standards, research, education, publication, and training seminars. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania back in 1969 at a dinner between, Jim Snyder and Gordon Davis the idea of the organization was formed, but the first formal meeting was at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. After that meeting was the actual birth of PMI, and back in Pennsylvania and article was filed and signed by the five recognized founds, James Snyder, Eric Jenett, Gordon Davis, A.E. “Ned” Engman, and Susan Gallagher. During that year they had the first Seminars & Symposium was held and 83 people attended. In the 1970s Project Management Journal, PMJ was published, that was first named Project Management Quarterly, PMQ. They also had their first PMI Chapter was chartered and PMI Professional Award Program was made, they held their Annual Seminars & Symposium was held outside the USA and by the end of the decade they had over 2,000 members. During the 1980s a Code of Ethics was adopted for the profession, the first Project Management Professional Certification exam was given. The PMI publishing products and services grew rapidly as well as first PMI book was co-published, PMI’s monthly magazine was born. The PMI Publishing Division was built in North Carolina, because of the growth that was made during the decade. In the 1990s PMI had over 8,500 memberships and by 1993 annual growth rate rose to over 20 percent a year. Also during the ‘90s SeminarsWorld, known then as Seminars USA, an educational programs on project management was started thanks to Specific Interest Groups and colleges. PMI broke through to the World Wide Web and A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge was published. At the beginning of the 21st century PMI had over 50 thousand members, 10 thousand certified Project Management Professionals and 270 thousand PMBOK Guide in circulation. Today the Institute has over 86,000 members in 125 countries, the individual members are practicing and studying project management in a wide variety of areas some including; aerospace, automotive, construction, business management, pharmaceuticals, and financial services. PMI has also become and continues to be the leading professional association.

        Project Management Body of Knowledge, PMBOK, is a set of standard terminology and guidelines for project management. In PMBOK they have a project life cycle that has phases; Initiation Phase, Intermediate Phase, and Final Phase, they are specific portions of the project that is defined by a collection of related activities and set of deliverables that have to be completed at the end of the project phase. Within the phases you have five process groups; Initiating Process Group, Planning Process Group, Executing Process Group, Monitoring and Controlling Process Group, and Closing Process Group, but not all of the process groups are done in each phase. It all depends on the project on is the process groups have to be repeated.

        The first process is the Initiating Process Group, this processes is the on to define a new project or new phase of an existing project. The main purpose of this process group is to get a clear description of the projects objectives, a basic description of the project scope, deliverables, project duration, and a forecast. The major output of this stage is a project charter and a preliminary project scope statement. The project charter provides a project manager with the right to bring a project team together to accomplish a task of completing a project successfully. The Project Charter should include the purpose/reason for the project with a description of the business need to fulfill the project, high level of requirements, and a summary of budget. The Preliminary Project Scope Statement identifies the high levels of project objectives, they must be clear, actionable, and measurable. The Preliminary Project Scope Statement should include a; project description, purpose, objectives, requirements, assumptions, situations or event on the ground that must be considered and accounted, boundaries, risks, what products and services are to be delivered, and milestones.

        Next is the Planning Process Group is has processes to support planning activities for a project or phase, that will help gather the right information needed to make a successful product or service. One of the first things is integration management where you develop a project management plan, which will describe how to manage the project or phase. Then you have scope management where you have the scope planning, process that documents how the project scope will be established and maintained, as well as how the Work Breakdown Structure, WBS, will develop. Along with the scope definition, the process necessary to develop a detailed scope statement, then create a WBS, the result that breaks down the project work into manageable components. Then there is the time management, where you have the activity definition, activity sequencing, activity resource estimating, activity duration estimating, and schedule development. Next you move onto the cost management where you have cost estimating and budgeting. Moving onto the quality management where you have do quality planning. Then to human resources management with human resource planning, and to communication management with communication planning. Then you move onto the risk management and finally procurement management with plan purchases and acquisitions and plan contracting.

        The next step in the processes is the Executing Process Group is where the actual plan is put into effect. It contains the processes that are used to complete the work as seen in the Project Management Plan to accomplish the requirement made by the client. Some of the activities that take place during this process is Managing Project Scope, Performing Quality Assurance, Acquiring the Project team, and Requesting and selecting products and sellers. The outputs of the Managing Project Scope is deliverables, requested changes, implement changes, corrective actions and preventive actions, defect repair, and the work performance information. While in the quality they plan to request changes, recommend corrective actions, and update organizational process assets and project management plan so that they can deliver a quality product so they meet the client’s standards. The Acquiring Project Team they want to be able to project staff assignments, resource availability, and update the Staffing Management Plan in order to ensure that the resources are available to finish the project. Develop Project Team is to improve the team dynamic in order to provide a better product over time. Then they need to request reseller responses to obtain bids and quotes from the people they want to provide the goods or service. Then they finally have to select the sellers so they have to review the offers and negotiate the contracts.