Integrated Project Management: How Software Integration Powers Successful Projects

Project management has its obstacles. Breaking down massive deliverables into smaller, achievable tasks. Keeping a team of experts aligned on objectives. Preventing the project’s scope from creeping to a point where the end result is a shadow of the project’s original intent. Getting buy-in from stakeholders when plans change.

But the challenges don’t end at your project’s boundaries. Projects impact each other across the organization, and few leaders have the strategic visibility they need to see these impacts.

That’s where integrated project management comes in.

What is integrated project management?

In most organizations, projects are run individually, with little in common between them. There may be a project management template bouncing around that some PMs use, but there’s no generally agreed-upon best practices. Each new project starts from scratch, with everything from methodology to reporting guidelines and basic tasks being up for discussion. Integrated project management, by contrast, aligns every aspect of running projects under a single umbrella.

The project management process is pre-defined and consistent throughout projects. Every project is part of a broader portfolio, rather than an isolated island. That means the planning, scoping, and resourcing for each project takes others into account. Specialists and managers across teams might be involved in various projects, even outside their typical teams, breaking down silos between departments. Decision-making accounts for every project in an organization’s portfolio, using a holistic view of everything happening at the organization rather than focusing uniquely on outcomes for individual projects in isolation.

In short, integrated project management is a single coordinated approach that covers all projects within an organization. It allows for better resource management, knowledge sharing between teams, and organization-wide visibility on risks and outcomes.

The seven steps of integrated project management

Here’s a step-by-step process for turning disjointed projects into a single, fully-integrated project management process.

Step 1: Develop your integrated project charter

Your project charter lists a project’s objectives, defines its scope, and ensures stakeholders sign off on what needs to happen before work can begin. But project charters are often created in isolation, with little oversight on other projects. The first step to setting up your integrated project management methodology is building a charter that shows how a project connects to the organization’s overall strategy, how stakeholders in other teams will be looped in, and the initiatives the project contributes to.

Step 2: Build your integrated management plan

Your project management plan needs to account for how projects might span the boundaries between departments, involve dependencies with other projects, or require input from stakeholders in other teams. When you’re figuring out how you’ll run a project, consider the following:

• Meet with representatives from different departments to get a full picture of dependencies and requirements.
• Build flexibility into your plan to account for dependencies or cross-functional impacts you didn’t anticipate.
• Review best practices and institutional knowledge established in other projects.

Step 3: Direct and manage cross-functional project work

When managing a cross-functional project under an integrated methodology, remember the following best practices:

• Collaborate asynchronously: When important updates are shared in meetings, stakeholders and collaborators in other departments might fall out of sync with project work. Prioritize asynchronous channels like Slack or your project management tool for important updates.
• Make progress tracking transparent: Project management platforms like Asana have built-in progress trackers and reports you should use to make this information more accessible to everyone involved in a project.
• Define expectations around communication: How will people communicate project updates? How are reports shared? How should someone ask a collaborator for a deliverable they need to keep moving? This should be clearly defined before your project begins and reinforced as it goes on.
• Build decision-making frameworks: How should decisions be made? Which stakeholders should be involved in routine decisions? What about more serious decisions?

Step 4: Manage project knowledge

Robust documentation is essential to integrated project management. Every project generates a ton of data that can be used to run better projects in the future (e.g., what happens when stakeholders aren’t properly defined at the start of a project). Pick a documentation platform—unless your organization already uses one—and record any lessons you learn or insights you gain from running a project. Then, make consulting that documentation part of your project management process.

Step 5: Monitor and control performance across all projects

Leadership should have a portfolio-wide view of active projects and their performance, the same way a financial advisor might track investments across asset categories. Project management tools often have built-in methods for doing this, but even a spreadsheet that reports on progress for key deliverables can be a good starting point.

Step 6: Perform integrated change control

When you’re managing a single project, a sudden change can potentially derail a few tasks or even an essential deliverable. But when that project is integrated with the rest of your portfolio, even a simple change can lead to a cascade of consequences. Have clear reporting guidelines so information about these changes can trickle up to the portfolio level, where project managers can perform impact assessments, coordinate approvals, and communicate updates to the right stakeholders. From there, leaders can make the decisions necessary to keep project portfolios healthy.

Step 7: Execute project closure and capture lessons

With an integrated project management process, every project is a massive opportunity for capturing learnings that impact your entire portfolio. But those learnings are only useful if they’re documented somewhere all project managers can access them. Define a shared platform for this documentation as part of your integrated project management process, then make sure the outcomes of each project are documented in it.

Why software integration is essential for integrated project management

Setting out to implement an integrated project management process is a solid goal. So why do organizations with excellent project managers struggle to do so?

Software integration.

Few organizations use a single platform to run all their projects. Even if they did, they’d have to use other tools to supplement their single project management app, from spreadsheets to CRMs. Having to rely on multiple tools can make communication and collaboration overly complex in even a single project—let alone an entire portfolio. That’s why software integrations are essential for integrated project management. They keep data flowing between tools so your project managers aren’t chasing updates and deliverables on top of the additional responsibilities that already come with integrated project management.

Real-time bidirectional sync: The integrated project management solution

Not all software integrations are suitable for every project. One-way automations like Zapier might be effective for simple processes or small teams, but they’re rarely enough for an integrated project management process. They can handle the creation of new tasks or updating small bits of information, but they have their limits.

That’s where a real-time bidirectional sync comes in. These integrations don’t just create new tasks or carry over simple data. They create true, two-way relationships between tasks in your project management tools and work items in other tools, automatically keeping both up to date as you work.

Unito has some of the deepest two-way integrations on the market for project management apps like Asana, ClickUp, and Smartsheet, as well as other platforms like Jira, GitHub, and ServiceNow.

The benefits of truly integrated project management

Break down organizational silos

In most organizations, silos form around departments and tools. These silos trap essential data, slow down collaboration, and potentially throw projects in complete disarray. Integrated project management breaks down these silos — especially when supported by software integration — since teams are expected to collaborate across department lines and PMs loop in stakeholders across the organization.

Gain complete portfolio visibility

Integrated project management makes portfolio-level visibility a default in organizations where it’s typically unavailable. Project managers are expected to report on their projects in a way that contributes to that visibility, and leaders get reports that support it, too.

Maximize resource utilization

When project managers and leaders get better visibility on the relationships between projects and their impacts organization-wide, they have a better sense of where project resources are going — and what the organization gets out of them. That gives them a better ability to dedicate resources to projects with a better ROI, improving outcomes for the organization overall.

Accelerate project delivery

Most projects run into delays when deliverables, updates, and tasks have to cross team or department lines. Integrated project management allows these things to move seamlessly, eliminating delays and misunderstandings. Teams don’t need weekly syncs to stay aligned. Their tools do it for them.

Achieve true strategic alignment

When strategic alignment depends on spreadsheets and reports being shared to a single tool, that alignment comes on the back of hours of manual work. Not only that, but project members and stakeholders alike have to consult that tool for updates. Integrated project management keeps everyone aligned, no matter where they work or what their role is.

Make integrated project management 

Integrated project management turns disparate projects into a portfolio which, just like an investment portfolio, can be reviewed, balanced, and optimized. Project managers can see where their projects contribute to broader organizational goals, leaders can allocate resources more effectively. Individual collaborators can collaborate more effectively across teams. Leaders get a better strategic view of everything going on in the organization. It’s a win-win-win.

But integrated project management can’t happen without the right integration.

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