Integrated Project Management Practices
Domain 2 tests whether you can run a project as one integrated system: initiation and authorization, integrated planning, performance and change control, and formal closure.
Integrated practices
- Initiation: confirm or develop the project charter - objectives, scope, deliverables, success criteria, constraints, assumptions, high-level risks and sponsor authority. The charter authorizes the project and the project manager.
- Planning: produce the project management plan plus subsidiary plans (scope, schedule, cost, risk, quality, resource, communication, stakeholder, procurement). Baselines are approved versions; planning is iterative, adding detail as uncertainty falls.
- Control: compare actual performance with baselines, forecast, and take corrective or preventive action. Integrated change control assesses every change request for impact on scope, schedule, cost, quality, risk and benefits before the authorized body decides.
- Closure: verify and obtain acceptance, hand over, close contracts, release resources, capture lessons learned and hand over the benefits realization plan.
Worked example
A supplier offers to shorten the build by ten days for EUR 20 000. The project manager does not accept informally. A change request is logged; impact analysis shows a schedule gain but increased testing risk and a 4% cost overrun; the change control board approves on condition that regression testing is not compressed. Plan and baselines are updated and versioned, and stakeholders are informed. Reasoning: integrated control treats baselines as connected, and approval authority sits with the body defined in the plan.
Traps that cost marks
- Accepting verbal changes, creating scope creep with no traceability.
- Believing baselines are frozen; they change only through approved change control.
- Closing at delivery without acceptance, handover and lessons learned.
- Planning once instead of re-planning at phase gates.