Project: temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result
Project Management: application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements
Project Management Process: a set of interrelated actions and activities performed to achieve a pre-specified product, result, or service
(PMBOK Guide, 4th edition)

A project management process is characterized by its input, output, and tools and techniques that can be applied. Project manager must take organizational process assets and enterprise environmental factors into account for every process. Organizational process assets provide guidelines and criteria for tailoring the organization's process to project requirements. Enterprise environmental factors may constrain project management options.

For a project to be successful, the project team must

1. select appropriate processes to meet project objectives
2. use a defined approach that can be adopted to meet requirements
3. comply with requirements to meet stakeholder expectations
4. balance competing demands of time, scope, cost, quality and resources to product specified product, service, or result

Project process can be either a project management process or a product-oriented process:

• Project management processes: ensure effective flow of the project by specifying tools and techniques involved in applying skills and capabilities in different project management knowledge areas.
• Product-oriented processes: specify and create the product.

A project management process "good practice" means that that is general agreement that its application has been shown to enhance the success rate over a wide range of projects but it does not mean that the described knowledge, skills, and processes should be applied uniformly.

Project management is a integrative effort where process is connected to other process. Actions taken in one process affects other processes, often requiring tradeoff among requirements and objectives. For example, a scope change in one process would affect the cost and time of other processes.

Project management processes are grouped into the following project management process groups:

• Initiating Process Group: processes performed to define a new phase or new project
• Planning Process Group: processes required to define the scope and objectives of a project
• Executing Process Group: processes performed to complete the work defined in the project management plan
• Monitoring and Controlling Process Group:processes required to track, review, and regulate project progress and identify and implement changes to the project management plan
• Closing Process Group: processes performed to finalize all project activities

There is more than one way to manage a project. Process groups are guides for iterative application of appropriate project management knowledge and skills. Due to the integrative nature of project management, monitoring and controlling process group must interact with all other process groups. Process groups are usually overlapping repetitive activities linked by their outputs where an output can be input for another process or a project deliverable.

Process groups have clear dependencies and are generally performed in the same sequence.