Published here July 2017

Introduction | The Challenge
Justification for Different Groupings: Project Management Hierarchy | Industry/Product Sectors
Internet Research | Taming the Long List of Industry Sectors
Significant Difference in Types of Output | Putting "Work" and "Product" Together
Comments Regarding Appendix A | Summary of Our Deliberations

Justification for Different Groupings — Industry/Product Sectors

In this version of our Glossary we have made an important distinction that is not yet accepted by many practitioners.

That distinction is a differentiation between the management of the project, i.e. "Project Management", and the management of the development of the required outcome or product — what ever that might be. This we call "Product Development [Management]". Of course, in practice, Project Management and Product Development must be closely integrated, as we shall note later. With this distinction in mind, we studied each and every definition in our listing of 7,000 or so Glossary entries.

As expected, it was evident that many project management terms and their definitions could be applied in many product sectors. However, a significant number were primarily relevant only in Product Development activities. Indeed, about a third of the entries in the Glossary are currently relevant to Product Development rather than Project Management.

That made it worthwhile studying which industries use, or could potential use, project management in their business. And those that do are typically grouped into specific product industries. When that is the case, we refer to that as an "Area of Application" (AofA) of project management. As expected, there are many definitions in our long list of terms and definitions that appear to be more relevant to an AofA than to one or more of the five project management hierarchical levels shown in Figure 1. And then they are often applicable only to specific products rather than all products.

Justification for Different Groupings — Project Management Hierarchy  Justification for Different Groupings
- Project Management Hierarchy

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