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

Explore how enterprise environmental factors and organizational process assets shape project decisions, including external and internal factors, governance, market conditions, policies, and the corporate knowledge base.

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 how project-based, functional, and matrix structures shape project manager authority, resource utilization, and key trade-offs like loyalty, centralized units, and role conflicts.

Compare project managers with functional and operations managers, highlighting how functional managers optimize technical performance, operations managers improve business efficiency, and project managers drive project success.

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.

Explore the three core project manager competencies: technical skills, leadership, and strategic business management, and learn how to apply predictive and adaptive approaches to plan, execute, and deliver business value.

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 the differences between management and leadership in project management, and learn how to balance them for each situation to guide teams, maintain systems, and solve problems effectively.

Examine how project managers choose among laissez-faire, transactional, servant, transformational, charismatic, and interactional leadership styles, guided by people, organization, and environmental factors to optimize team performance.

Performing integration aligns project objectives with strategic goals by guiding the integration of processes, knowledge, and people, coordinating change control, and managing context and complexity across the project.

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

Explore project integration management, the first knowledge area, guiding charter development, planning, execution, knowledge management, monitoring, integrated change control, and project closing to unify and coordinate all components.

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.

Direct and manage project work to execute the project management plan, delivering approved changes and deliverables through integrated change control, using expert judgment and project management information system.

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.

Monitor and control project work by tracking and reviewing performance, producing work performance information and reports to forecast cost and schedule and guide corrective actions.

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.

Identify and track key performance indicators defined from business objectives to monitor project health, using leading and lagging metrics, SMART criteria, and forecasts.

Learn the essentials of project scope management, including product and project scope, six planning and control processes, progressive elaboration, and preventing scope creep.

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.

Collect requirements by eliciting, analyzing, and documenting stakeholder needs to define product and project scope. Apply smart criteria to ensure these requirements are measurable and traceable.

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.

Master controlling project scope to prevent scope creep by enforcing change control and integrated change management, keeping the scope baseline intact through updates to plans and documents.

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 gold plating as voluntary addition of free features beyond the scope baseline, with risks of customer expectations, rejection, and rework; enforce formal change control to avoid it.

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.

Estimate activity durations to determine how long each task takes, using resources and data. Apply analogous, parametric, three-point, and bottom-up estimating with expert judgment and risk considerations.

Develop schedule by integrating activity sequences, durations, resources, and calendars into a schedule model, using critical path method and resource optimization to establish a baseline and monitor performance.

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.

Learn three point estimation and Monte Carlo analysis in Excel, using optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic estimates, triangular, beta, and PERT distributions to forecast revenue, cost, and risk.

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.

Manage quality in agile by conducting frequent quality reviews, embedding reviews per iteration, and delivering small patches; use retrospectives to identify root causes and drive continuous improvements.

Identify and acquire both human and physical resources, develop and monitor teams, and optimize resource utilization through agile practices, lean, just-in-time, and continuous improvement.

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.

Estimate activity resources defines the type, quantity, and characteristics of resources for each activity, periodically coordinating with costs, durations, budgets, and the basis of estimates.

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.

control physical resources by aligning allocations with the plan, monitor plan versus actual usage, and apply corrective actions to keep resources available on time and in place.

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.

Plan communications management early to produce a robust communications management plan that meets stakeholder information needs with the right channels and technologies, updating as stakeholders and projects evolve.

Enhance project outcomes by managing communications throughout the project, ensuring timely, appropriate information flow between the team and stakeholders through flexible media, feedback loops, and tailored artifacts.

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.

Prioritize project risks through qualitative risk analysis by evaluating probability, impact, urgency, and manageability; identify risk owners, update risk registers, and use risk workshops to focus on high-priority threats.

Quantitative risk analysis numerically evaluates identified risks' impact on project objectives, assigning cost and time values and using Monte Carlo simulations to guide contingencies, risk responses, and the risk report.

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.

Implement risk responses to execute agreed plans, empower risk owners, and update the risk register, project documents, and change requests to address threats and opportunities.

Monitor project risks by tracking identified risks, evaluating responses, and updating the risk register and plans with data analysis and audits to base decisions on current 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.