CompTIA Project+ (PK0-005) Complete Course & Practice Exam

Discover how project management turns ideas into tangible outcomes by applying methodologies, defining scope, managing teams and budgets, and delivering new value through structured templates and standards.

Develop essential project management skills by balancing adaptability, discipline, and strong interpersonal relationships; plan meticulously, collaborate across teams, and apply critical thinking to solve problems and adapt to change.

Discover how project management brings order and efficiency, saving money and preventing costly errors through checklists, planning, contingency reserves, and governance considerations.

Differentiate operational and project work, noting how environment, roles, and structure affect communication; a project is unique, has a specific purpose, and is temporary.

Explore functional, projectized, and matrix organizational structures and how they shape project teams, budgets, and decision authority, including advantages, disadvantages, and the project manager’s role.

Explore how programs group related projects to achieve big goals, how program managers coordinate dependencies and stakeholders, and how portfolios prioritize projects for strategic alignment and resource optimization.

Explore how the business case justifies a project by outlining the problem, options, and financial overview. Learn how environmental, social, and governance factors and storytelling connect stakeholders to project value.

Explore project management methodologies and frameworks, from waterfall, agile, Scrum, and Kanban to PRINCE2 and SAFe, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and how to select the right approach for IT projects.

Explore the waterfall project management method, a linear six-phase approach—requirements, design, implementation, testing, delivery, maintenance—with its advantages, disadvantages, and ideal use cases.

Learn Scrum, a lightweight, customer-centric agile framework delivering iterative value through empiricism and lean thinking, with five values, three pillars, four roles, and a four-step process using product backlog.

Learn kanban, visualizing work on a board, limit work in progress, make policies explicit, manage flow, implement feedback loops, and improve collaboratively while evolving experimentally.

Explore extreme programming (xp), an agile software development framework that puts the customer on the team, emphasizes simplicity and continuous integration, and uses paired programming and test first practices.

Explore the scaled agile framework (SAFe) that coordinates multiple teams through agile release trains, iterations, and program increments, balancing alignment with autonomy.

Explore the software development life cycle as a flexible framework, with planning, requirements, design and prototyping, development, testing, deployment, operations and maintenance, and models like waterfall, iterative, spiral, and agile.

Compare waterfall and agile product ownership and outline the roles of product owner, project manager, and product manager across a product’s lifecycle, plus how backlog and WBS drive collaboration.

Compare Waterfall and Agile team composition, size, cross-functional roles, and resource allocation, and show how Scaled Agile coordinates several small Agile teams to support larger projects.

Highlight budget and schedule choices for waterfall and agile projects, contrasting rigid waterfall costs with agile's flexible, iteration-based cost planning tied to deliverables.

Initiate the project by assembling the team, defining roles with RAM (RACI), and establishing project initiation documents, including the charter, scope statement, records management plan, and kickoff meeting.

Explore project team roles and responsibilities, from project manager and sponsor to business analyst, architect, developer, tester, subject matter expert, vendor, and stakeholder, plus core and extended team dynamics.

Identify and assemble project team by evaluating skillsets, availability, and roles, customizing the structure to fit the project and establishing an organizational chart with sponsor, steering committee, and project manager.

Define who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for each task in a RAM (RACI) chart. Apply the seven steps to create RAM during initiation and improve communication.

Develop a records management plan in the initiation phase to classify data into public, internal, confidential, and restricted, document essential project decisions, and outline creation, storage, and archival standards.

Compare and apply communication management concepts to facilitate effective meetings, manage teams and resources, and perform planning phase activities.

Explore communication methods and modalities in project management, comparing synchronous and asynchronous timing, written, verbal, and nonverbal formats, and formal versus informal internal and external audiences.

Learn to manage language, time-zone, technology, and cultural barriers in project communication, optimize word choice, use interpreters and captions, and apply asynchronous methods to keep teams connected.

Share information to educate or persuade audiences through demonstrations, status updates, and standups, quickly aligning stakeholders on product updates and project progress.

Collaborative meetings empower project managers to gather customer requirements and spark solutions through focus groups, workshops, joint application development sessions, and brainstorming, balancing diverse participation and structured agendas.

Learn the team lifecycle through Tuckman's five stages and master conflict management by identifying substantive and emotional conflicts, their causes, and applying smoothing, forcing, compromising, collaborating, and avoiding.

Explore project management tools across domains 1 and 3, applying meeting management techniques and managing resources, while selecting tools—from cloud to on-premise—plus collaboration and scheduling tools for effective projects.

Compare cloud-based, on-premise, and local installation options for project management software, highlighting access methods, pricing models, overhead, and total cost of ownership.

Explore common project diagrams such as Gantt charts, flow charts, decision trees, data flow diagrams, mind maps, and quadrant diagrams. See how these visuals convey timelines, processes, dependencies, and decisions.

Explore collaboration tools for real-time multi-author editing, file sharing, and workflow and e-signature platforms. Learn how knowledge bases and whiteboards support distributed teams while managing permissions, revisions, and security.

Explore email, chat, SMS, face-to-face, telephone, video conferencing, and enterprise social media as project management tools, highlighting advantages, limitations, and suitable use cases.

Develop a communication plan by identifying stakeholders and their preferences, creating a plan with goals, team members, artifacts, channels, recipients, frequency, and outcomes to guide engagement and reliability.

Develop an escalation plan that defines categories, levels, owners, and triggers to rapidly resolve project issues. Create and approve this plan in initiation to improve issue visibility and problem solving.

Master the solution design process to optimize projects within the operating environment, define high level design and low level design, and set non-functional requirements to minimize changes.

Explore a solution design approach that weighs functional and non-functional requirements, constraints, and environmental factors, culminating in a detailed design document with high-level and low-level designs.

Explore solution design in agile projects, balancing up-front and iterative design, using non-functional and stakeholder requirements, with user stories and sprint-based collaboration to refine design across iterations.

Explore the law of diminishing returns and the Pareto principle to identify the 20% of causes delivering 80% of the benefit. Apply Pareto charts in solution design.

Explore data classification from public to restricted, protect PII and PHI, and apply data handling, privacy laws, and intellectual property guidelines for compliant projects.

Learn how project managers protect sensitive information with digital and operational security, enforce least-privilege access, use multi-factor authentication and virtual private networks, and manage background screening and security clearances.

Explore the three resource types: human, physical, and capital, and their life cycles, including acquisition, management, and decommissioning, plus budgeting and capacity considerations to support project success.

Calculate shared resource capacity by identifying total hours and overhead, then determine disposable time and divide by the number of projects. Allocate the result per project as an upper limit.

Conduct a structured four-step needs assessment to identify project requirements, current resources, and gaps, then plan to address them with a balanced resource approach.

Use gap analysis to identify skill, feature, function, and utilization gaps between current and desired states, then address them with training, hiring, or implementing quality control plans.

Explore resource optimization techniques to balance workloads and prevent over-allocation, using resource smoothing to distribute work without shifting end dates and resource leveling to extend the timeline when needed.