HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

At least several papers in the literature (e.g., see Bibliography notes 4, 5, and 28), as noted in Meredith and Mantel [21] discuss particular templates for the traditional coordination of budget, schedule, and scope. And while project management texts recognize the importance of integration, most give a only few pages to its explicit mention. In his discussion of the growth of project management from its “traditional” ways, Kerzner [18] writes that “modern” project management demands integration skills of its practitioners, and he quotes several specialists who testify to the critical importance of these skills. Kerzner also reminds us that the global project manager faces especially difficult integration problems.

The Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK®) [25] advocates the standard approach to “project integration management,” dealing with plan development, execution, and change. In contrast, this book views integration as expressed in 1967 in a classic paper in the Harvard Business Review [19] as “the achievement of unity of effort.”

The authors of “New Management Job: The Integrator” did not use the words “project management,” which they may not have recognized as a discipline in 1967, but they indicated the primary area that the integrator should handle: “the nonroutine.” They also anticipated “rapid rates” of change that would drive organizations to operate “like R&D-intensive firms”—in other words, companies would work with projects, and projects need integrators.

More than 30 years later, in a special series by the Industrial Research Institute dedicated to Succeeding in Technological Innovation, another author discussed management of the “innovation process” and wrote that it requires “a dedicated full-time coordinator-integrator,” who should communicate well and be skillful both technically and in business. [22]

Whatever the description and whatever the locale, effective integration management in projects comprises two inherent components: hard work and a good attitude (which itself often requires hard work). Good project plans are not static until after the project ends. Project changes mandate continuous iteration and integration of project plans. As Frame observed, reluctantly but realistically, “between 50 and 65 percent of our project budgets is dedicated to chasing paper.” [13] Much of this paperwork, now with a huge electronic component, is rightfully driven by the integration concerns of managing the project and its plans and personnel.