PMP Course (Knowledge Area-Based) (39 PDUs)

The PMO centralizes project management, acting as a stakeholder and decision maker to align projects with business objectives. Supports, controls, or directs projects with templates, standards, and training.

Explore the project manager's sphere of influence, roles, and responsibilities across stakeholders, sponsors, and end users; learn how to balance budget, schedule, and resources through proactive communication and cross-project coordination.

Learn PMI research-informed leadership qualities, including visionary goal setting, collaborative problem solving, effective communication, and servant leadership, to build trust, balance scope, and empower teams.

Learn how project managers navigate politics and power dynamics within organizations and industries. Examine different forms of power—positional, informational, referent, situational, personal, relational, reward, punitive, and persuasive—to achieve project goals.

Explore cognitive biases that distort project decisions, including anchoring, sunk cost, availability, confirmation, Dunning-Kruger, halo, and groupthink, and learn to mitigate them.

The project manager oversees end-to-end integration across knowledge areas, coordinating schedules, costs, quality, and scope, while leveraging automated tools, visual management, tacit knowledge transfer, and hybrid agile-predictive methods.

Develop project charter process creates a formal document that authorizes the project, assigns the project manager's authority, and links the initiative to organizational strategy.

Develops the project management plan by defining, preparing, and coordinating all plan components into an integrated baseline for scope, time, and costs, guiding execution and control.

Manage project knowledge uses existing knowledge and creates new knowledge to meet objectives and support organizational learning, distinguishing explicit and tacit knowledge and promoting trust-based knowledge sharing.

Learn to review, approve, and implement change requests through an integrated change control process, via the Change Control Board, change log, and formal documentation across project documents and baselines.

Close the project or phase by finalizing activities, transferring the final product or service to the client, obtaining formal sign-off, and archiving records while releasing resources.

Promote self-organization and servant leadership in agile environments to address integration management, enabling cross-functional collaboration, broad skill bases, and iterative, bite-sized deliverables with adaptive change.

Explore emerging trends in scope management during the pre-conception phase, emphasizing collaboration between project managers and business analysts to shape the business case, define needs, and identify viable solutions.

Define, validate, and control the project scope via the scope management plan, guided by the project charter, organizational assets, and enterprise environmental factors, producing the requirements management plan.

Define scope selects final project requirements from the requirements documentation. Build a detailed scope statement and set boundaries and exclusions under the 100 percent rule.

Create a work breakdown structure by decomposing the project scope into work packages, establishing a scope baseline and WBS dictionary, and applying rolling wave planning and the 100 percent rule.

Learn how the validate scope process formalizes delivery acceptance, distinguishing verification from validation, and ensures verified deliverables are accepted by clients and sponsors through inspections.

Plan and execute agile iterations by designing, developing, testing, and deploying small patches. Maintain a living backlog, engage stakeholders, and use Moscow prioritization to deliver highest-value items.

Identify business needs, drive change, and deliver value by using insights from data, elicitation and analysis, and recommended solutions that align with strategy and stakeholder goals.

Explore how project schedule management ensures timely completion by selecting the critical path approach or agile methods, defining activities, sequencing, and building a flexible schedule model.

Develop a schedule management plan to govern how the project schedule is planned, developed, managed, and controlled, incorporating inputs, expert judgment, data analysis, and meetings.

Define activities by decomposing work packages into actions that produce deliverables, enabling estimation, scheduling, and updating the activity list and attributes via rolling wave planning.

Transform a list of activities into a connected network diagram by documenting predecessors, successors, and leads and lags to define the sequence and publish the schedule baseline.

Monitor actual performance against baselines, update the schedule model with progress data, and apply earned value analysis and critical path methods to keep the project on schedule.

Explore agile considerations, on-demand scheduling and the theory of constraints to optimize bottlenecks, implement pull-based just-in-time production, and enhance backlog prioritization and retrospectives.

Learn how to plan, estimate, budget, and control project costs within an approved budget through cost management processes, reserves, padding, and monitoring for diverse stakeholder needs.

Define how costs will be estimated, budgeted, managed, monitored, and controlled through a cost management plan that sets baselines, thresholds, and uses earned value analysis.

Develop accurate cost estimates by applying analogous, parametric, bottom-up, and three-point techniques, balancing direct and indirect costs, risks, and quality across control accounts and reserves.

Aggregate cost estimates to form an authorized cost baseline and funding requirements. Align with activity schedules and monitor project performance against the baseline.

Monitor and control project costs by maintaining the cost baseline, applying earned value analysis, and using variance, trend, and reserve analyses to forecast and manage expenditures.

Compute opportunity costs by comparing foregone profits among mutually exclusive options, then select the option that yields the highest expected profit.

Plan quality management, then manage and control quality to meet stakeholder expectations, balancing prevention over inspection with the cost of quality.

Explore three quality theorists and their approaches to quality management: Deming’s plan-do-check-act and 14 points; Duran’s fitness for use and top management involvement; Crosby’s zero defects and cost of quality.

Plan quality management by identifying quality standards, creating a quality management plan and quality metrics and matrices, and tracking and optimizing project quality across processes, inputs, and stakeholders.

Translate the quality management plan into executable quality activities, embedding safety standards, and continuous improvement methods like Kaizen and Six Sigma to sustain project quality.

Apply the control quality process to monitor and verify that project deliverables meet requirements, with internal checks, data analysis, inspections, and testing guiding acceptance and ongoing improvements.

Learn how to define, estimate, acquire, and manage both physical and human resources, creating a resource management plan that guides allocation, procurement, and team development.

Acquire internal and external resources—team members, facilities, equipment, and materials—to execute project activities, negotiating with managers and suppliers and updating plans and assets as needed.

Develop team builds competencies and trust through proactive leadership and emotional intelligence to boost project performance, addressing collaboration, empowerment, cross-training, and the five stages of team development.

Manage team guides tracking performance, resolving issues, and managing changes to optimize project performance, while applying communication, conflict management, and leadership to motivate and align the team.

Discover how agile resource management uses self-organizing teams and generalized specialists to boost collaboration and rapid decision making while applying just-in-time delivery and lean practices.

Explore negotiation as an inevitable skill that seeks win-win outcomes, BATNA awareness, and durable agreements, balancing price, terms, and trust through competence and authority.

Plan, execute, and monitor project communications to ensure timely, appropriate information flow; covers the communication management plan, written and spoken forms, internal and external channels, and stakeholder needs.

Monitor communications analyzes feedback to ensure information needs are met, optimizes stakeholder engagement, and triggers updates to the communications management plan.

Enhance agile communications by ensuring accessible, up-to-date information through co-location or shared portals, enabling osmotic information flow. Promote transparency through stakeholder reviews and emphasis on working software over documentation.

Learn to identify, analyze, plan responses, implement, and monitor project risks, distinguishing threats from opportunities and applying iterative, integrated risk management across project, program, and portfolio levels.

Develop and implement a risk management plan to identify, analyze, monitor risks and responses, and define strategy, methodology, roles, funding, timing, and risk categories.

Identify risks early by documenting individual and overall project risks in the risk register and risk reports, guiding proactive team ownership.

Plan risk responses guide option development, strategy selection, and resource allocation to address project and individual risks, using inputs, tools, and contingencies to manage overall risk exposure.

Learn two flowcharts for managing identified risks, detailing non-contingent and contingency strategies from risk identification through qualitative and quantitative analysis, planning, implementing, monitoring, and adjusting responses.