PMI SP Exam Preparation Workshop: 30 Contact Hours, 2024

Define how projects are temporary endeavors that create a unique product, service, or result by delivering verifiable deliverables and outcomes that drive value.

Explore the relationships among projects, programs, portfolios, and operations management within organizational project management, highlighting how portfolios align with strategic objectives, programs coordinate interdependencies, and projects deliver benefits.

Explore project lifecycle with sequential, iterative, or overlapping phases, compare predictive (waterfall) and adaptive (agile) life cycles, and study phase gates with the project management plan and benefits management plan.

Understand how work performance data are collected, analyzed, and transformed into information, then distributed as work performance reports to guide decisions across the project life cycle.

Explore the project business case and benefits management plan—developed pre‑project and aligned with the charter—covering needs, analysis, recommendation, evaluation, target benefits, and risk measures.

Identify how enterprise environmental factors and organizational process assets influence project management, with internal and external factors guiding processes, policies, procedures, and knowledge bases.

Explore how the project management office standardizes governance, shares resources, and supports projects through supportive, controlling, and directive PMOs to align with organizational strategy.

Identify the competencies of a project manager across technical project management, leadership, and strategic business management within the PMI talent triangle. Lead teams and align strategy to maximize business value.

Explore how project management processes transform inputs into outputs through tools and techniques across traditional and agile life cycles.

Learn how the five process groups (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, closing) and ten knowledge areas coordinate project management to achieve objectives, including sponsor authorization and planning work.

Explore the foundations of the agile development life cycle, its history, and the agile manifesto, highlighting flexibility, team roles, and differences from traditional predictive methods in information technology projects.

Compare agile and predictive approaches to decide when to use adaptive methods for high uncertainty or definable work, noting four agile values, twelve principles, and methods like kanban.

Compare agile and waterfall (traditional) project management to show how to select the environment based on project requirements and uncertainty, highlighting defined versus empirical processes, iteration, and delivering value early.

learn Agile Manifesto values and its twelve principles, including individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change, guiding iterative delivery and practices like Scrum and Extreme Programming.

Agile lifecycle emphasizes iterative and incremental delivery with feedback to refine requirements, using either time-boxed sprints with a product backlog or flow-based Kanban that pulls work from the backlog.

Define and control project scope by planning scope management, collecting requirements, detailing the project and product scope, creating a WBS, and validating and controlling deliverables in predictive and agile lifecycles.

Plan scope management by defining, validating, and controlling the project and product scope, using inputs from the project charter and management plans to produce the scope and requirements management plans.

Collect requirements by eliciting and documenting stakeholder needs to shape the project and product scope, using seven inputs, diverse tools, producing requirements documentation and a requirements traceability matrix.

Define the project and product scope by filtering requirements, applying expert judgment and data analysis techniques, and producing a detailed project scope statement with acceptance criteria and exclusions.

Create the work breakdown structure by decomposing project deliverables into work packages, establishing the scope baseline, and aligning inputs like scope statements and requirements documentation.

Validate scope formalizes customer acceptance of completed deliverables, increasing acceptance probability, using inspection and voting to verify deliverables against the scope baseline and requirements traceability matrix.

Monitor and control the project scope by comparing actual performance to the scope baseline, using variance and trend analysis, and issuing approved change requests.

Solve scope management quiz items to locate acceptance criteria in the WBS dictionary, understand scope baseline components, and trace requirements to objectives using the WBS and product analysis techniques.

Explore the project schedule management knowledge area, detailing how to plan, define activities, sequence work, estimate durations, and develop the schedule to meet deadlines, monitor progress, and support performance reporting.

Plan schedule management defines policies, procedures, and documentation for scheduling activities, incorporating inputs like project charter and management plan, using expert judgment and data analysis to produce schedule management plan.

Define activities by decomposing work packages from the WBS into actionable activities, producing the activity list and attributes for estimating, scheduling, executing, monitoring, and controlling the project work.

Sequence project activities by converting the activity list into a precedence diagramming method network. Link dependencies with finish-to-start, start-to-start, and leads and lags to optimize the project schedule.

Use the planning process group to estimate activity durations, applying analogous, parametric, bottom-up, and three-point estimates.

Develop and sustain a realistic project schedule by building a schedule model and baseline, applying critical path analysis, what if scenario analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, and schedule compression techniques.

Monitor and control the project schedule by updating the schedule baseline and managing change requests. Apply predictive and agile techniques, including retrospectives, to keep timelines accurate.

Solve the schedule management quiz questions to apply PERT duration, definitive estimates, rolling wave planning, and agile scheduling techniques in project management.

Plan project cost management, estimate costs, determine the budget, and control costs to maintain the cost baseline and forecast future costs.

Plan cost management defines how project costs will be estimated, budgeted, monitored, and controlled, and documents the cost management plan guiding earned value, thresholds, and control accounts.

Aggregate activity costs to establish the time-phased cost baseline and the project budget, incorporating contingency reserves while distinguishing management reserves.

Master earned value analysis to control project costs by monitoring planned value, actual cost, and earned value, and forecasting cost outcomes with CPI, SPI, and the estimate at completion.

Solve real-world project cost and value management questions using earned value management, estimation techniques, and cost planning, covering CPI, EV, AC, CV, SV, and SPI.

Explore project resources management, distinguishing physical and human resources, and learn to plan, estimate, acquire, develop, manage, and control resources with functional managers.

Plan resources management defines how to estimate, acquire, and manage team and physical resources, producing the resource management plan and team charter to guide project execution.

Estimate activity resources identifies the team, materials, equipment, and supplies needed to perform the project work and work packages, producing resource requirements and a resource breakdown structure.

Acquire internal or external resources by selecting, negotiating, and assigning them to activities, using inputs from the project management plan and procurement, with tools like multi-criteria analysis and virtual teams.

Develop team in the resources management knowledge area to improve competencies and interactions, boosting project performance with inputs from the resource management plan and tools like co-location and virtual teams.

Monitor the availability and utilization of physical resources to ensure they are available when needed, used as planned, and released when no longer required.

Solve quiz questions covering the responsibility assignment matrix, staffing plan, emotional intelligence, resource management planning, team charter, RBS, and conflict resolution techniques across acquire and control resources.

Learn how to plan, manage, and monitor project communications across formal and informal channels, applying the five c's and active listening to meet stakeholder needs.

Plan communication management develops an approach to project communications, detailing stakeholder information needs, formats, frequency, and outputs like the communication management plan and stakeholder engagement plan.

Implement the communication management plan to ensure timely and appropriate information flow to stakeholders, using the right media and PMIS, with actionable outputs and plan updates.

Monitor communications ensures the information needs of project stakeholders are met by aligning messages with the communication management plan and stakeholder engagement plan, delivering timely, effective updates.

Solve ten quiz questions to review core project reporting and communication concepts. Focus on progress and status reports, earned value, forecast reports, and project communications.

Introduce the seven processes of project risk management—from planning and identifying risks to qualitative and quantitative analysis, risk responses, and monitoring risks for proactive handling of threats and opportunities.

Define how risk activities will be conducted and integrated with other knowledge areas, creating the risk management plan, establishing risk thresholds, risk categories, and stakeholder risk appetite.

Identify and document individual project risks and sources of overall risk using structured inputs, tools, and techniques, and update the risk register and risk report.

Prioritize project risks by performing qualitative risk analysis, evaluating probability and impact to update the risk register, designate risk owners, and produce risk reports and a watch list.

Perform quantitative risk analysis to numerically evaluate overall project risk using Monte Carlo simulation and the expected monetary value, updating the risk report with risk exposure and contingency reserves.

Plan risk responses to clarify strategies for threats and opportunities, using inputs from the risk register and the project management plan, to minimize risk exposure and update plans.

Implement risk responses to execute planned risk strategies, assign risk owners, and monitor outputs like change requests and updated documents to minimize threats and maximize opportunities.

Monitor risks tracks the implementation of risk responses, identifies risks, and updates the risk register and risk report using data analysis techniques, risk audits, and risk reviews.

Identify inputs for the risk management plan, such as the stakeholder register and project documents, then perform qualitative and quantitative risk analysis and determine contingency reserves.

Identify stakeholders, plan stakeholder engagement, manage stakeholder engagement, and monitor stakeholder engagement to ensure ongoing communication and stakeholder satisfaction.

Identify and analyze all potential stakeholders early and throughout the project, producing a comprehensive stakeholder register and updates to plans to enable targeted engagement.

Identify and engage stakeholders across the project life cycle by planning approaches, implementing strategies, communicating, and addressing issues to increase support and minimize resistance.

Monitor stakeholder engagement throughout the project by tracking relationships, updating engagement plans, and adjusting strategies using data analysis, decision-making, and communication tools.

Learn key stakeholder engagement concepts through quiz insights: use the stakeholder engagement assessment matrix and register, classify engagement levels, apply the salience model and power–interest grid, and practice active listening.