PMP Exam Prep Seminar - Complete Exam Coverage with 35 PDUs

People ask if they need to read the PMBOK Guide for their exam. Or should they add other resources to their study efforts? Or can they pass with just this course. Those are all tough questions, as I don’t know you, your background, or project management experience. I can say, however, that having too many resources crowds your concentration. You need laser-focus and I believe this course is the best method to get you there.

Thousands and thousands of people have completed earlier versions of this course both online and in my live PMP Exam Prep seminars. I’ve kept records of trending questions that people have and created this Frequently Asked Questions documentation. Please check out this FAQ – your question may be herein. If not, ask a question through the Q&A interface.

Contact hours and PDUs are not the same thing! You get contact hours before you are a PMP. Once you're a PMP, then you can earn PDUs... this lecture explains the difference.

This lecture also explains the new PMI Talent Triangle and how your PDUs are distributed among technology, leadership, and business.

I'm often asked how long should it take to pass the PMP? Well, technically you only have four hours to pass the test, but you can prepare to pass the PMP in four weeks. Four weeks?! Absolutely!

In this lecture I'll walk through a sample four-week strategy and a six-week strategy that you can adapt to pass the PMP.

Having confidence is a must as you prepare to pass the PMP – and it’s a value for being a great project manager. But how do you gain confidence? By achieving step after step, experience, and believing in yourself. You can do this.

If you’re aiming to pass the PMP exam you’re obviously already serving in the role of a project manager. So often with PMP candidates, however, they’ll try to answer the PMP exam questions based on how they manage projects in their environment, rather than how the PMBOK Guide suggests as best practices. I’m not saying that you aren’t effectively managing projects where you work, but I am saying that you need to answer exam questions according to the PMBOK Guide rather than solely on your project management experience.

In the PMBOK Guide, there is a clear profile of the ideal project manager and an ideal environment. Part of the profile, is the ability to be flexible, to adapt, and to follow best practices. That’s really what you’ll be tested on: what’s the next best thing to do in any given scenario. It all begins, really, with a clear understanding of what the project manager does and what the PMBOK Guide expectations of a project manager is. That’s the goal of this chapter; let’s build a solid foundation of the project manager role that you’ll be tested on so you can clear the exam and continue on with your life and career.

The environment where a project exists can influence how you manage the project, expectations of the project manager, how stakeholders contribute to the project, and a myriad of other concerns. Understanding the environment and what’s expected of the project manager as far as formalities, processes, rules and regulations, and even simpler things like templates and forms are all part of the project environment.

The project manager’s role is to get things done by leading the project team through the challenges of the project to achieve the project goals and objective. Most often, project managers get involved with a project after the vision of the project has been created. Consider a project to build a house, design some software, or to move employees from one building to another. All of these projects and their objectives can be defined well before the project manager is involved.

However, it’s not unusual at all for project managers to be involved in the project formulation before the project is initiated. A project manager could consult with the portfolio review board, customers, and management to offer input before a project is selected, funded, and then initiated. Project managers may work with business analysts (or take on the role of a business analyst) to gather requirements, create high-level estimates, and develop business cases and feasibility studies – all work that precedes project initiation.

This knowledge area deals with the planning, creation, protection, and fulfillment of the project scope. One of the most important activities in all of project management happens in this knowledge area: creation of the work breakdown structure. Oh, joy!

Schedule management is crucial to project success. This knowledge area covers activities, their characteristics, and how they fit into the project schedule. This is where you and the project team will define the activities, plot out their sequence, and calculate how long the project will actually take.

Cost is always a constraint in project management. This knowledge area is concerned with the planning, estimating, budgeting, and control of costs. Cost management is tied to time and quality management—screw either of these up and the project costs will increase.

Quality is about conforming to requirements and creating a deliverable that is fit for use. Let's explore this project management knowledge area.

his knowledge area focuses on organizational planning, staff acquisition, and team development. You have to acquire your project team, develop this team, and then lead them to the project results. This knowledge area deals with both physical resources, like materials and equipment, and human resources.

The majority of a project manager’s time is spent communicating. This knowledge area details how communication happens, outlines stakeholder management, and shows how to plan for communications within any project.

Let's take a quick look at Chapter 11 in the PMBOK Guide, Project Risk Management

Stakeholders are the all people who are affected positively or negatively, or perceived to be, by your project. They can influence your project’s success as a subset of them defines the projects goals. Project stakeholder management is also about engaging and maintaining the stakeholder engagement.

It takes daily work and dedication to run a marathon. You can’t run occasionally, skip your workouts, and eat poorly. You need a daily commitment to the race in all areas of your life. The same is true with the PMP exam – you need daily work, daily commitment. 

The sixth edition of the PMBOK Guide will be referenced throughout this book. Why? Well, your PMP exam is largely based on the facts, figures, and subtleties of the current PMBOK Guide. The good news is that unlike the PMBOK Guide—fine book that it is—this course you are completing is in plain language. This course, unlike the PMBOK Guide, focuses on how to pass the PMP exam. It will also help you be a better project manager and explain some mysterious formulas and concepts, but its main goal is to get you over the hump toward those three glorious letters: PMP.

Regardless of what some projects may seem like, they must be temporary. If the work is not temporary, it is operations. Like a good story, projects have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Projects end when the scope of the project has been met—usually. Sometimes projects end when the project runs out of time or cash or when it becomes clear that the project won’t be able to complete the project objectives, so it’s scrapped. You might also experience the end of the project when it becomes clear that the project is no longer needed, such as when a new technology supersedes the project you’re managing.

Projects need to provide business value. Business value is the sum of the benefits that an organization can quantify. Benefits can usually be defined in financial terms, but they may also be intangible benefits, such as goodwill, brand recognition, benefits to the public, strategic alignment, and even your organization’s reputation. Time savings, a common business value, can be quantified. You’re looking for benefits for stakeholders in the form of monetary assets, equity, utility, fixtures, tools, and market share. Business value is almost always quantified in financial terms—something that helps set the objectives of the project. You might be asked to predict the profitability of a project to justify the organization’s investment in the project. As you know, projects cost money and time, and you’ll have to justify that investment of resources up front. This is where we’ll get into project selection, return on investment, and whether your project—or any project—should move forward or not.

In alignment with business value is the discussion of project initiation: why choose a project at all? For most project managers, this question is out of their scope of responsibilities, but they may get called upon to contribute to the project selection and initiation conversation. As a general practice, there are four reasons why projects get initiated:

•             Satisfy stakeholder requests, needs, and opportunities

•             Meet regulatory requirements, legal requirements, or social requirements

•             Change business and/or technological strategies in the organization •             Improve upon existing products, processes, or services or add new products, processes, and services

Application areas of discipline that a project may be based on. Consider technology, law, sales, marketing, and construction, among many others. The application area, or discipline, you work in is likely different than other project managers in this course. The application area affects how the project is managed, not the other way around.

Yes, you want to think through the questions on the exams, but don’t overthink the questions. Thinking too much allows you to twist and convolute the answers to fit a scenario. Nope! Just answer the question with the best answer, not the what-if answ

A project manager will deal with governance on several different levels. Portfolios are the collection of projects and programs that the organization invests in. Programs are a collection of projects working toward a common goal. In a program, projects are managed uniformly to achieve benefits that you likely wouldn’t get if each project were managed independently of the others. And projects, of course, are the temporary endeavors to create a unique product, service, condition, and result. For each of these items, a project governance defines the rules and policies that affect the project manager.

Program management is the management of multiple projects all working in unison toward a common goal. Programs achieve benefits by managing projects collectively, rather than independently. Projects within a program can better share resources, improve communications, manage interdependencies, resolve issues quickly, leverage resources, and provide more benefits for the organization than they would if each project were not managed collectively under a program. Projects within a program still have project managers, but the project managers work with, and often report to, the program manager.

A project management office (PMO) organizes and manages control over all projects within an organization. A PMO is also known as a program management office, project office, or sometimes, the program office. (And I’m sure some project managers have other names for them that won’t be on the PMP exam.) PMOs usually coordinate all aspects, methodology, and nomenclature for project processes, templates, software, and resource assignment. Ideally, a PMO creates a uniform approach within an organization so that all projects, regardless of their discipline, technology, or purpose, are managed with the same approach. The PMO can help project managers share resources (people, facilities, and equipment) across projects, offer coaching and communication, help with change control and stakeholder management, and help resolve issues.

Organizational project management (OPM) is an organizational approach to coordinate, manage, and control projects, programs, and portfolio management in a uniform, consistent effort. The philosophy of OPM is that by doing all work within projects, programs, and portfolio management with the same type of processes, actions, and techniques, the organization will consistently deliver better results than it would if the processes and approach were independent of one another. While project, program, and portfolio each have different skill sets, there is overlap in their approach, and these endeavors may utilize the same resources—including you, the project man

The investments the company makes in projects and programs should have, of course, a positive return. These investments are monitored by the portfolio review board and portfolio manager through communications with the program managers and the project managers. The organization wants to see a return on investment through profits, social or performance improvements, reduction in waste, or other key performance indicators established at the selection of the projects and program investment.

Processes exists within process groups, but processes are also part of knowledge areas. In this section I'll walk you through how processes are in both process groups, such as planning, and in a knowledge area, such as Project Schedule Management. 

Projects, being the temporary and unique things that they are, require the project manager to be actively involved with the project implementation. Projects are not self-propelled. Project management is accomplished by using the correct project management processes at the right time, to the correct depth, and with the correct technique. These processes, which you’ll learn throughout this course, are logically organized in five process groups:

•             Initiating

•             Planning

•             Executing

•             Monitoring and controlling •             Closing

Chances are that you follow a prescribed methodology to manage projects where you work. Your work environment uses names for some of these processes that differ slightly from those presented here and in the PMBOK Guide, and that’s perfectly fine. The methodology that your organization uses to manage projects is just that—a method. The PMBOK Guide is not a methodology, but a guide to the best practices of project management. The flexibility of the PMBOK Guide and project management is beautiful, when you think about it. Okay, maybe “beautiful” isn’t the best word, but the flexibility works. The processes and approaches that you utilize in your project management approach involves tailoring of the processes, and that’s what’s needed in every project. Tailoring enables you to choose what processes should be used on a project and to what depth the processes should be used.

Adaptive life cycles can be either agile, iterative or incremental. Change is highly probable, and the project team will work closely with the stakeholders regarding any changes in the project. You might also know this approach as agile or change-driven. This is new information to the PMBOK Guide, but the amount of information is somewhat light. You should be topically familiar with adaptive projects for your exam.

Business documents are referenced throughout the PMBOK Guide, sixth edition.Business documents are used as inputs and are also outputs of the project management processes. Let's take a look now at what business documents are in a project.

Projects that are large in scope will likely be preceded by a business case, an analysis of the financial feasibility and validity of the proposed project. The business case will walk through the proposed project, include a sense of how much the project will likely cost, calculate the return on investment for the project, and offer reasons why the project should, or should not, be initiated. The business case can help decision-makers (the project sponsors or the project steering committee) make a go/no-go decision to proceed with the project.

When a project is initiated, it sets about to accomplish something, to create something, and, most importantly, to achieve business value for the organization. The project will create a result, and that result is all about benefits. Benefits are the results and outcomes of project actions. Consider a construction company, for example: when it constructs a building for a client, there are obvious benefits to the client and community, but there are also benefits for the construction company. The company will generate income, create opportunities to market itself based on the project success, maintain employees, provide educational opportunities with the team, and obtain other benefits as a result of the project work.

There are ten project management knowledge areas in the PMBOK Guide. You must know these knowledge areas, how they affect one another, and their processes. We'll be spending the bulk of our time reviewing these project management knowledge areas for your PMP in this course. Let's dive in and check these out now.

Why are you pursuing the PMP? Is it for a better opportunity? To advance your career? To become a better project manager? Whatever the reason why your goal of passing the PMP, you should examine your benefits of earning the PMP. Make it personal – when it’s personal, it’s more valuable to you. 

This section covered the fundamentals of project management and the expectations for the PMP examination. The PMBOK Guide is an excellent book that documents the ideal processes and procedures for project management. The PMP exam is based on the PMBOK Guide, and this book (the one you’re reading now) focuses on the key exam essentials to help you pass your PMP exam. We discussed what a project is and is not. Projects are temporary endeavors to create a unique thing, product, or service. An operation, on the other hand, is a series of activities that go on and on, such as manufacturing a car, writing a newspaper column, or running a business. Many businesses have a business model of completing projects for other people or organizations.

The environment in which a project exists can influence the expectations of the project manager, how you manage the project, how stakeholders contribute to the project, and a myriad of other concerns. Understanding the environment and what’s expected of the project manager as far as formalities, processes, rules, and regulations—and even simpler things like templates and forms—are all part of the project environment. Often when we discuss the project environment, we think of things like the tangible attributes of where the project takes place: construction sites, offices, hospital settings, and more. Although these are certainly part of the environment, there’s also the political landscape, the reputation of the project manager and stakeholders, and the industry influence in which the project is operating. The environment includes all characteristics of where the project exists—all the moving parts, the seen and unseen, and the expectations of management regarding the project manager; these are all parts of the project environment.

So what’s an enterprise environmental factor and what’s an organizational process assets? What about processes, policies, and procedures that are unique to the organization? 

Ideally, your organization has a method for cataloging, archiving, and retrieving information from past projects and work. The PMBOK calls these the “knowledge repositories.” This is most likely an electronic data storage and retrieval system, or it might just be a hallway closet full of past project files.

A system is a way of doing things. When I wash the dishes, I have a system for how I load the dishwasher that’s completely different from my wife’s approach. Or when I make purchases, track receipts, and do my company’s bookkeeping, I have a system that’s orderly and reasonable. Organizations, big and small, need a system that provides structure for how projects and operations complete the assigned work, strategies, and vision of the organization. The organizational system is unique to that company and may have been planned from the start or evolved over time through trial and error.

Management elements are the functions of a manager, including to some extent project managers. Through the governance framework, managers are expected to utilize varying levels of management skills. As a project manager, you’ll likely have some, if not all, of the following management elements as part of your role of a project manager:

• Delegation of project work to the project team
• Authority to assign resources to project work
• Expectations of respect for others, authority, and organizational rules
• Unity of command (one person is in charge)
• Unity of direction (one plan driven by one person)
• Clear communication channels
• Provision of materials to people as needed
• Fair and equal treatment of people on the project team and stakeholders Positive, optimistic personality

These first several sections have all been about the foundation of the PMP. Some of this, if not all of this, may have been a review of things you’ve already learned as a project manager. Now, moving forward, we’re going to be diving into some very specific, very important project management terms and concepts. Keep going! 

If you’re aiming to pass the PMP exam, you’re obviously already working as a project manager. So often, PMP candidates will try to answer the PMP exam questions based on how they manage projects in their environment, rather than how the PMBOK Guide suggests as best practices. I’m not saying that you aren’t effectively managing projects where you work, but I am saying that you need to answer exam questions according to the PMBOK Guide rather than basing your answers solely on your project management experience.

Where you work as a project manager is likely different from where any other reader of this book works as a project manager. Just as every project is unique, so is the environment in which a project exists. Consider software development projects, construction projects, IT infrastructure projects, learning and development projects, and various other types of projects. Each of these different projects operates in a distinct environment. The environment is a factor of influence in these projects and in your projects.

Project managers must also provide leadership. Leadership, the third angle of the PMI Talen Triangle, focuses on dealing with people. You’ll manage the project team, work with vendors, and keep stakeholders informed, involved, and excited about the project. Leadership means that you’ll be optimistic, collaborative, and able to manage conflicts that will creep up within the project. Project managers must build trust, address concerns with stakeholders, and be able to persuade, gain consensus, compromise, network, and provide a long-term view of how the project fits into the overall business strategy. A term you’ll see in Agile project management is “servant leadership,” which means that while you’re the leader, you’re also supporting the project team and ensuring that they have what they need to do their work on the project.

Integration, in this context, differs from project integration management. Instead of addressing the interrelationship among the project processes, project integration in this context addresses how the project is integrated with the goals, tactics, and vision of the organization, not just the project scope and knowledge areas. Integration at this level means that you’re working with the project sponsor to ensure that the goals and objectives of the project mesh with the goals and objectives of the organization. Projects must support the broader vision and purpose of the organization or the project likely isn’t contributing to business value and may have challenges garnering support within the organization.

One of the attributes of a good project manager is the ability to problem solve. This means you can ponder situations, work with experts to help you make decisions, and then make effective decisions quickly. The PMP exam is proof of this crucial project management ability: problem solving.

The role of the project manager is to manage the project work, lead the project team, and get things done. The project manager works with the project team to achieve the project objectives, contribute to business value, and coordinate the activities, communications, and events that happen within a project. Project managers facilitate processes to reach predefined expectations and usher the project through initiating, planning, execution, monitoring, and controlling—and, ultimately, to project closing. Through experience and training, the project manager’s competency increases. The project manager should ascertain his level of skill in management and leadership areas; identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; and then decide to improve upon his management prowess. The PMI Talent Triangle aims to address the three common areas of education for project managers: technical project management, leadership, and strategic and business management

Within any project are many moving parts: schedule management, cost management, schedule conflicts, human resource issues, iterative planning, alternative methods to doing the project work, and much, much more. Project integration management is the art and science of ensuring that your project moves forward and that your plan is fully developed and properly implemented. Project integration management requires that your project—regardless of its size and impact—meshes with the existing operations of your organization. This knowledge area encompasses integrated change control, too; you’ll need to manage changes that are bound to happen within your project.

Project integration management requires finesse. As the project manager, you will have to negotiate with stakeholders to resolve competing project objectives. This requires organization, since you’ll have to develop, coordinate, and record your project plan. It requires the ability to accomplish your project plan. It requires leadership, record keeping, and political savvy, given you’ll have to deal with potential changes throughout your project implementation. And, perhaps most importantly, it requires flexibility and adaptability throughout the project plan execution.

Of all the project management knowledge areas, project integration management is the one that’s totally managed by the project manager. Cost management, schedule management, risk management, and other knowledge areas can be managed within the project by specialists from your organization. But project integration management is totally led by the project manager – it’s the day-to-day work of the project manager. And like most things in project management, the larger and more complex the project, the more detail, organization, and sophistication is needed within project integration 

The various benefit measurement methods are all about comparing values of one project against the values of another. As you might expect, the projects with higher, positive values typically get selected over projects with low values. This lecture describes some common benefit measurement methods you may encounter on your exam.

Assumptions should be documented in an assumptions log. This includes assumptions estimates, planning, scheduling, and so on. Assumptions can be considered risks, because false assumptions can alter the entire project.

So you’ve got a project plan—great! Now the work of executing the project plan begins. The project manager and the project team will go about completing the promises made in the project plan to deliver, document, measure, and complete the project work. The project plan will communicate to the project team, the stakeholders, management, and even vendors what work happens next, how it begins, and how it will be measured for quality and performance.

In this lecture, I'll discuss corrective actions, preventive actions, and defect repair.

The product of the project is created during these execution processes. The largest percentage of the project budget will be spent during the project execution processes. The project manager and the project team must work together to orchestrate the timings and integration of all the project’s moving parts. A flaw in one area of the execution can have ramifications in cost and additional risk and can cause additional flaws in other areas of the project.

Executing the project plan will also create work performance data. Work performance data are observations, measurements, and facts that aren’t necessarily useful without some content. You’ll see coming up that work performance data is analyzed and processed into work performance information. Work performance information will then help you create work performance reports to communicate information about your project. A little tip, these happen in alphabetical order: data, information, and then reports.

When you manage a project you’ll rely on your existing knowledge, based on your education and experience, but you might also learn new things to better manage the project. That’s what this new to PMBOK Guide, sixth edition, process is all about. Managing both existing knowledge and new knowledge while managing the project. It’s not just documenting information, but documenting knowledge to openly share with others in the current project, future projects, and in operations to support the solution the project creates.

Integrated change control examines a change request to determine the total effect the change may have on all parts of the project: deliverables, project documents, and the project management plan. It determines the value of the change on the project to help determine whether the change should actually be approved, declined, or postponed. Integrated change control examines changes that stem from scope, cost, schedule, and contract, though scope changes are the most common.

The approach that you take with your project has a direct effect on how you’ll manage the project scope. In a predictive life cycle, the deliverables are all defined upfront before the project execution really begins. In an adaptive or agile life cycle, the project scope and deliverables are defined through iterations of planning and executing. The elements of the project scope in an agile environment are agreed upon at the launch of each iteration.

There are two scopes in project management: the project scope and the product scope. The product scope is all the details and specifications of what the result of the project will be for the recipients of the project: the user, the customer, the organization. The project scope describes all the work required to create the product scope. In some instances, the product scope and the project scope are melded together as just the project scope, while in other projects, these are two distinct scopes. Your exam may have a question or two about the concept of product scope, but the overwhelming concern of this book, and project management, is on the project scope

A big consideration in this project management knowledge is the difference between the predictive and the agile and adaptive environments. While the predictive environment is keen on defining and documenting all requirements upfront in a project, agile and adaptive environments are not. Adaptive and agile projects release prototypes of the solution to allow requirements to move through requirements refinement. Requirements in an agile environment are added and prioritized in a backlog. At the start of each iteration, the requirements are prioritized and the team decided how many of the prioritized requirements that can deliver in the iteration.

A requirements traceability matrix will track each requirement from its first entry, through executing, all the way into the operational transfer. When you’re managing loads of requirements, an RTM can help you track several characteristics for each requirement:

• Requirement name
• Requirement’s link to the business and project objectives
• Project scope and WBS entry
• Any relevant data, coding, cost, or schedule about a requirement
• Requirement’s current status as active, cancelled, deferred, added, approved, assigned, or completed
• Testing activities for each requirement Comments or notes about the requirement

The process of scope definition is all about defining the project and product scope. It creates the project scope statement that fully communicates what the project will, and will not, create as a result of the project work. The project scope statement is a clear vision of what the result of the project will create. If you wanted to create a new house, you probably wouldn’t stop by the lumberyard; pick up a truck of lumber, some cement, and nails; and set about building your dream house. You’d follow a logical approach to first defining the house, then go about the planning and creating the house

Imagine a project to create a full-color, slick catalog for an electronics manufacturer. The project manager has completed the initiation processes, moved through planning, and now the team is executing the project work. The only trouble is that the project manager and the experts on the project team aren’t sharing their work progress with the customer. Plus, the work they’re completing isn’t in alignment with the product description or the customer’s requirements

When it comes to project management, the one constant thing is change. Changes happen, or try to happen, all the time in projects. The project manager must have a reliable system to track, monitor, manage, and review changes to the project scope. Scope control focuses on three things:

• It facilitates scope changes to determine that changes are agreed upon.
• It determines whether a scope change has happened. It manages the scope changes when, and if, they happen.

Projects exist to satisfy the project requirements. Project requirements are discovered through interviews, focus groups, workshops, and other elicitation techniques to help the stakeholders and the project team clearly understands what the project should create. The requirements documentation, the requirements management plan, and a requirements traceability matrix all help the project stay focused on expected deliverables and serve as input to the project scope. A business analyst may lead the requirements collection process along with a project manager, or even before the project manager is selected and the project initiated. Project scope management is the ability to complete all the project’s required work—and only the required work. This means no extras, no favors, and no cutting corners. The project scope is the focus of the project—or rather, the work necessary to complete the project. Project scope management is a tool the project manager uses to determine what work is necessary in the project and what work is extraneous.