The Project Integration Management Knowledge Area includes the processes and activities needed to identify, define, combine, unify, and coordinate the various processes and project management activities within the Project Management Process Groups. In the project management context, integration includes characteristics of unification, consolidation, articulation, and integrative actions that are crucial to project completion, successfully meeting customer and other stakeholder requirements, and managing expectations. Integration, in the context of managing a project, is making choices about where to concentrate resources and effort on any given day, anticipating potential issues, dealing with these issues before they become critical, and coordinating work for the overall project good. The integration effort also involves making trade-offs among competing objectives and alternatives. The project management processes are usually presented as discrete components with well-defined interfaces while, in practice, they overlap and interact in ways that cannot be completely detailed in the PMBOK® Guide.

The need for integration in project management becomes evident in situations where individual processes interact. For example, a cost estimate needed for a contingency plan involves integration of the planning processes described in greater detail in the Project Cost Management processes, Project Time Management processes, and Project Risk Management processes. When additional risks associated with various staffing alternatives are identified, then one or more of those processes must be revisited. The project deliverables also need to be integrated with ongoing operations of either the performing organization or the customer's organization, or with the long-term strategic planning that takes future problems and opportunities into consideration.

The integrative nature of projects and project management can be better understood if we think of the other activities performed while completing a project. For example, some activities performed by the project management team could be to:

• Analyze and understand the scope. This includes the project and product requirements, criteria, assumptions, constraints, and other influences related to a project, and how each will be managed or addressed within the project.

• Document specific criteria of the product requirements.

• Understand how to take the identified information and transform it into a project management plan using the Planning Process Group described in the PMBOK® Guide.

• Prepare the work breakdown structure.

• Take appropriate action to have the project performed in accordance with the project management plan, the planned set of integrated processes, and the planned scope.

• Measure and monitor project status, processes and products.

• Analyze project risks.

Among the processes in the Project Management Process Groups, the links are often iterated. The Planning Process Group provides the Executing Process Group with a documented project management plan early in the project and then facilitates updates to the project management plan if changes occur as the project progresses.

4.6 Integrated Change Control - reviewing all change requests, approving changes, and controlling changes to the deliverables and organizational process assets.

4.7 Close Project - finalizing all activities across all of the Project Management Process Groups to formally close the project or a project phase.