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.
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