PMP Exam Cram Course - 35-Hour Course Condensed - 12 PDUs

Distinguish project, operations, and project management using PMBoK terms; apply knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to meet project requirements and manage risks, resources, and timing.

Understand programs as groups of related projects coordinated for benefits, and portfolios as collections of projects, programs, other portfolios, and operations, managed to achieve strategic objectives and long-term goals.

Identify the value a project delivers and what must change to realize it. Project management moves organizations from current state to desired state through changes in products, services, and processes.

Define phases within the project life cycle as collections of related activities that yield deliverables. Ensure deliverables are verifiable outputs, tangible or intangible, and require acceptance before the next phase.

Identify the project life cycle and its five phases that output deliverables, and note how the phases are managed as predictive, agile, or hybrid.

Identify and manage stakeholders who are affected or perceived to be affected by a project, including customers, team members, sponsors, and functional managers, with both positive and negative impacts.

Explore how organizational structures shape project power, resources, and budgeting by comparing functional, matrix (weak, balanced, strong), and project ties structures where the project manager's authority varies.

Explore how the project management office standardizes processes and shares resources, methodologies, tools, and techniques across large projects, and compare the three PMO structures—supportive, controlling, and directive.

Explore the six project constraints—schedule, cost, scope, risk, quality, and resources—and learn how each limits work, driving effective project management decisions.

Explore predictive (traditional waterfall) and adaptive (agile) project management approaches, including their upfront planning versus evolving scope, change control, and collaboration.

Understand the difference between risk and issue in project management: risks are potential events that may impact the project; issues are current problems that have materialized.

Compare leadership and management using PMI's definitions to see how influence, process development, and relationships shape project outcomes across predictive and agile contexts.

Develop your project management skills by mastering emotional intelligence to recognize and manage emotions in yourself and others, improving leadership and communication.

Explore the 12 project management principles outlined in the PMBoK guide seventh edition, and learn how they guide decisions, strategies, and problem solving across projects.

Develop stewardship in project leadership by upholding integrity, care, trustworthiness, and compliance; foster collaborative teams and actively engage stakeholders to deliver value.

Explain how value drives project success and differentiate quantitative and qualitative value. Apply systems thinking to interdependent project domains and practice adaptive leadership to meet stakeholder needs.

Tailor project methods to each unique context by balancing predictive and agile approaches, guided by principles 7-9, to enhance quality and manage complexity across stakeholders, requirements, and risk.

Explore principles 10-12 of risk management: optimize risk response, adapt to change, and enable change with resiliency and stakeholder engagement to minimize threats and maximize opportunities across projects.

Explore the eight performance domains that drive integrated project delivery, which are interdependent and guided by principles, and shaped by context, stakeholders, and team dynamics.

Engage stakeholders through proactive strategies to boost project decisions and outcomes, build a high-performing team, tailor development approaches (adaptive, hybrid, predictive), and plan across life cycles.

Explore domains 5 to 8—work performance, delivery performance, measurement performance, and uncertainty—and learn how establishing processes, managing work, delivering value, measuring performance, and handling risk apply to any project.

Apply the Oscar model to coach and lead teams by defining outcomes, assessing situations, exploring choices and consequences, committing to actions, and reviewing progress toward high performance results.

Explore key change models for organizational transformation, including the ADKAR elements—awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement—alongside Kotter’s eight-step process and Bridges’ transition model.

Apply the Drexler Sibbet team model, tracing seven stages from orientation to renewal, and learn how to build a project team, align goals, and handle changes.

Explore the predictive project management section, covering 49 processes and key terms like scope management plan and risk register, with emphasis on understanding over memorization.

Discover how predictive project management uses five process groups, initiate, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing, with 49 processes and inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs.

Learn how expert judgment, data gathering, data analysis and representation, and decision-making tools help plan and control projects, using techniques like fishbone diagrams, histograms, flow charts, and facilitation.

Explore common outputs at project completion, including change requests, corrective and preventive actions, defect repair, and work performance data, information, and reports, and updates to the project plan and assets.

Develop the project charter to authorize the project and assign the project manager, and identify stakeholders to populate a dynamic stakeholder register.

Develop the project management plan by integrating 24 processes into 18 components and 14 subsidiary plans, with four baselines guiding scope, schedule, cost, and quality.

Plan scope management and the requirements management plan to define, validate, and control project scope, collect requirements, and build scope statement, WBS, and WBS dictionary to prevent scope creep.

Plan the schedule management, define activities from the WBS, sequence them into a network diagram, and estimate durations to build the project schedule.

Develop a comprehensive budget by planning cost management, estimating costs, and determining the cost baseline, including contingency and management reserves, using cost aggregation and S-curve analysis.

Identify quality requirements and document how to demonstrate compliance through the quality management plan; define quality metrics and analyze the cost of quality and cost-benefit tradeoffs.

Plan resource management describes how to estimate, acquire, manage, and release team and physical resources, using tools like RACI charts, organization charts, and a resource breakdown structure.

Plan communication management to keep stakeholders engaged by detailing who gets what information, when, how, and in what format, using communication requirements analysis and the n(n-1)/2 formula.

Identify risks continuously, build a risk register and risk breakdown structure, and plan responses using qualitative and quantitative analysis for negative and positive risks, including avoid and mitigate.

Plan procurements by defining outside work and contract types—fixed price, cost reimbursable, or time and material—and document deliverables, scope, and terms in the procurement management plan.

Plan the stakeholder engagement plan using an engagement assessment matrix to map current and target levels and implement tactics like meetings, demos, and surveys.

Execute work while monitoring and controlling it in parallel to keep the project on plan, coordinating team development, resource management, and quality control.

Direct and manage project work as the top integration process to execute the plan. Capture work performance data and issues, manage change requests, and document lessons learned for organizational learning.

Translate the quality management plan into executable quality activities to meet quality objectives. Learn the difference between manage quality and control quality by inspecting deliverables and applying quality control measurements.

Manage resources effectively across team and physical resources, acquire and develop the team, apply conflict resolution and motivational theories, and control resource utilization for successful project execution.

Explore the Myers-Briggs type indicators, a famous 16-type personality test, demonstrated via ENTJ and ENTP examples, and its relevance to hiring, leadership, and the PMP exam.

Explore five key PMP exam terms for people management, including student syndrome, Parkinson's law, self-protection, sandbagging, and dropped baton, with practical explanations to ace drag-and-drop and multiple-choice questions.

Execute the communication management plan by delivering project communications, including meetings, emails, and updates, and monitor adherence to the plan, adjusting as needed to meet stakeholder requirements.

Identify, implement, and monitor risks throughout the project by executing responses from the risk register, continuously updating risks (positive and negative) to minimize threats and maximize opportunities.

Learn to conduct procurement by evaluating seller proposals, awarding contracts, and using bidder conferences, then monitor and control vendor performance through inspection and claims resolution, finalizing with closeout.

Learn to actively manage and monitor stakeholder engagement by following the engagement plan, delivering product demos and meetings, addressing issues, and adapting strategies for sustained involvement.

Monitor and control project work to ensure alignment with the project management plan, track progress, and produce the work performance report, staying on budget, schedule, and scope, triggering change requests.

Assess every change request to determine its impact on scope, budget, schedule, resources, quality, and risk, then obtain approval from the change control board or sponsor and update the plan.

Learn to monitor and control scope, schedule, and cost to prevent scope creep, track variances, and use change requests and work performance information to keep the project on its baselines.

Validate scope with the customer to obtain formal acceptance of the verified deliverable, then close the project by transferring the final product and delivering the final report with lessons learned.

Explore essential PMP formulas for critical path management, earned value management, and three-point estimation (PERT), and learn to calculate and interpret metrics like SPI and CPI.

Explore earned value management formulas and their application, including pv, ev, ac, cv, cpi, sv, spi, eac, vac, and bac, with practical scenario calculations.

Explore earned value management through a step-by-step scenario, calculating pv, ev, ac, cv, cpi, sv, spi, eac, vac, and tcpi to assess budget and schedule performance.

Memorize essential earned value management formulas with practical tips, covering budget, planned value, earned value, actual cost, variances, CPI, SPI, and forecasting metrics like EAC and VAC.

Explore the critical path method within schedule management by drawing network diagrams that map activities, parallel tasks, and dependencies from start to finish.

Discover earned value management through essential formulas that track cost and schedule performance by comparing planned work with actual work, with practice scenarios and 12 key formulas.

Calculate the critical path by evaluating all start-to-finish paths and selecting the longest duration, here A-B-C-E at 11 days, which sets the project end date and has no slack.

Use the pert three point estimate, derived from the beta distribution, to forecast activity durations using a weighted average of optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic inputs.

Master pert concepts by working through three practical examples—roof, kitchen renovation, and software—you'll apply optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic estimates, and compute beta, triangular, and standard deviation values.

Master pert beta calculations, standard deviation, and triangular estimates using optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic values; memorize formulas, practice with examples, and use the calculator to verify results.

Explore iterative and incremental development in agile projects, showing how iterative builds the entire product for feedback, while incremental delivers software in small, useful increments.

Agile boosts project success with greater customer involvement and frequent feedback, delivering value early in increments and welcoming changes through a product backlog.

Learn the agile mindset for project delivery, embracing changes, value-driven delivery, and continuous feedback in incremental releases. Apply learnings to manage teams, customers, and ongoing retrospectives to improve processes.

Agile delivers in increments, releasing accounts payable, receivable, payroll, and banking sooner than traditional methods. It highlights customer feedback and incremental planning, with highly regulated projects sometimes favoring traditional approaches.

Learn how inverting the triangle contrasts traditional projects, which keep scope fixed while time and cost vary, with agile projects that fix time and cost while redefining the scope.

Explore the four values of the Agile Manifesto and how they guide all agile methods, highlighting individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change.

Apply the 12 agile guiding principles from the Agile Manifesto to any project. Deliver valuable software continuously, welcome late changes, and empower self-organizing teams through collaboration, simplicity, and technical excellence.

Explore the scrum process and agile practices, detailing the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily stand-up, sprint review, and retrospective to deliver value in increments.

Explore Scrum roles and responsibilities, including product owner, Scrum master, and development team, and learn how transparency, inspection, and adaptation guide backlog prioritization and collaborative delivery.

Explore the four scrum ceremonies—sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review, and retrospective—and how they drive a time-boxed sprint, sprint backlog, and stakeholder feedback.

Explore scrum artifacts including the product backlog, sprint backlog, and product increment, and learn how grooming, prioritization by the product owner, and the definition of done guide value and feedback.

Define a global, project-wide definition of done at project start to specify what completes work, including tests, documentation, and outputs, with product owner and customers aligning the team.

Learn extreme programming (xp), an agile software development method focused on simplicity, communication, and feedback, with roles like coach, customer, programmers, testers, and compare it to Scrum.

Compare scrum and xp to map similarities and differences, covering sprint length, planning games, product owner or customer roles, retrospectives versus reflections, and cross-functional, self-organizing teams.

Explore lean software development, from the Toyota production system, to reduce waste, empower teams, deliver fast, and build quality with continuous improvement and customer value.

Manage projects with Kanban development by using a signboard to visualize workflow, limit work in progress, and identify bottlenecks to improve flow and collaboration.

Explore the 12 principles of servant leadership to support agile teams, balance welfare with project goals, and guide ethics, integrity, conflict resolution, reflection, and thinking backwards toward the vision.

Learn value-based prioritization for agile projects by ranking the product backlog using methods like Moscow, dot voting, 100-point, monopoly money, and keno analysis, guided by customer input.

Highlight face-to-face communication as the most effective method for stakeholders, and emphasize two-way feedback, information radiators, and low-tech, high-touch tools like whiteboards and social media in agile environments.

Clarify agile roles—the delivery team, product owner, and scrum master (or agile project manager)—and their collaboration via the product backlog, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.

Develop a high-performance agile team that is self-organizing and self-directed, with generalizing specialists who share work to reduce bottlenecks, and maintain a shared vision.

Explore how to design effective agile team spaces, from face-to-face setups and Kanban boards to virtual co-location and osmotic communication, to support collaboration across co-located and distributed teams.

Decompose requirements into user stories to create a shared agile understanding; connect epics, features, and tasks, write stories as users in the three c's format, and groom the story backlog.

Discover how to use relative sizing and the Fibonacci sequence to assign story points for agile sprint planning. Learn planning poker and wideband Delphi, and how velocity informs project schedules.

Learn to read burn up charts and burn down charts, measure completed and remaining work, and track team velocity with iteration-based story points in agile projects.

Learn to run a sprint retrospective to inspect and improve team work, using five phases, data gathering, five whys, fishbone diagram, and smart goals for continuous improvement.

Blend agile and predictive (waterfall) methods in hybrid projects, using four approaches from the Agile Practitioner Guide to manage definable and uncertain work.

Embrace the traditional mindset to follow the project plan, manage changes via approved change requests, and engage stakeholders while the team identifies risks, defines quality, and integrates scope, time, cost.

Apply agile mindset through servant leadership, empower teams, limit work in progress, prioritize the product backlog with the product owner, and foster face-to-face collaboration with visual management and retrospectives.

Celebrate completing the PMP exam cram course and stay engaged via weekly live streams and forums as you aim to pass the exam on the first try.