Project Management Knowledge Areas
Project Management Knowledge Areas as explained in PMBOK® Guide (A standard by PMI®)
A project manager has to manage multiple aspects of the project continuously throughout the project life-cycle from initiation to closure. These aspects such as scope of the project, given time frame, project cost, risk, quality, communication, procurement and human resources are termed as project management knowledge areas in PMBOK® Guide.
Integration Management is the primary work, a project manager should do all the time without delegating to any one which ensures that activities in different knowledge areas are progressing in a synchronous manner. Scope, Time and Cost often called Triple Constraints are the core knowledge areas. These areas in general get impacted if you have issues in any area.
In MS Project Context, four knowledge areas (scope, cost, time and resources) in the above figure 1.2 are shown in green which indicate that these aspects of project can be managed with Microsoft Project 2016. That means you can define complete scope of the project in terms of WBS in Project 2016, can take care of complete cost including fixed and variable, all the resources can be managed and ensure the timeline which is the primary objective of any scheduling tools like Project 2016.
You can manage knowledge areas that are shown in yellow i.e. stakeholder, communication, quality, procurement and risk up to certain extend in MS Project 2016 and you need to define and control work outside project 2016 also to manage them fully. That means Project 2016 helps in managing stakeholders, communication, quality, procurement and risk on a project. For example in communication management, MS Project will provide you progress data, status, reports etc. but what, when and to whom to send the information is beyond MS Project. Similarly Project 2016 helps you identifying risks associated with scope, time, cost, resources, inter-dependencies etc. Similarly there will be many other areas where MS Project may not be of help.
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