PMP Certification Exam Prep 2026: 35 PDUs & 1,000+ Questions

Define operation vs. project, highlighting ongoing work with deadlines, and show how a completed project leads to operation and how an operation may spawn a new project.

Explore the characteristics of the three major organizational structures: functional, matrix, and project-oriented, and learn how authority, resource management, and career paths differ across them.

The project sponsor or initiator finances the project, provides support, prevents unnecessary changes, and approves the project charter and project management plan, keeping work on budget and the baseline.

Examine the project team's roles in planning, executing, and monitoring work, including developing the schedule and budget, creating the work breakdown structure, and managing changes and reports.

The functional manager is a department head and subject matter expert who oversees resources, motivates teams, and participates in risk identification and change control, with approval power varying by structure.

Explain the program manager’s role coordinating related projects to align with business strategy, and the portfolio manager’s role overseeing programs, projects, and operations to meet strategic goals.

Compare the project lifecycle with project management processes, explore the five process groups, phase gates, and predictive, adaptive, and hybrid lifecycles with practical construction and IT examples.

Review the essential terms of project management and the key stakeholder roles—project manager, sponsor, and project team—and plan to revisit their responsibilities for the exam in upcoming lectures.

A process converts inputs into outputs using tools and techniques, with outputs potentially feeding other processes, across five focus areas and seven performance domains.

Provides a high-level overview of initiating processes, stakeholder identification, scope, requirements, schedules, and resources across predictive, agile, and hybrid lifecycles, with the project management plan unifying plans.

Explore the tailoring concept in project management, adapt processes and documents to fit each project’s environment, stakeholder needs, and organizational context, and tailor lifecycles and techniques accordingly.

Learn how value-based delivery drives project outcomes in the PMBOK 8 framework, prioritizing high-value work, incremental delivery, and measurable benefits to align sponsors and stakeholders.

Learn how expert judgment, drawn from external consultants or internal experts, guides legal advice, technical insights, and cost estimation, and how these experts collaborate with the project manager.

Master data gathering tools and techniques, data analysis, and data representation for decision making and project planning. See examples like brainstorming, benchmarking, checklists, interviews, questionnaires, and surveys.

Explore how the project management information system (PMIS) uses automated tools to simplify scheduling, time tracking, procurement, and information collection, with examples like Microsoft Project and cloud storage.

Explore the fundamentals and evolution of artificial intelligence, from early rule-based computers to modern machine learning and deep learning, and discover how ai concepts apply to project management.

Explore the AI family and distinguish artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, large language models, generative AI, and GPT with simple definitions and practical examples for project management.

Integrate sustainability across all project areas to balance environmental, social, and economic impacts and deliver long-term value through scope, schedule, cost, risk, and governance.

The internal rate of return (IRR) measures investment profitability by the discount rate that makes net present value zero, guiding project choice by the highest IRR on the exam.

The payback period equals the time to recover the initial investment from net cash inflows; select the project with the shortest period, while acknowledging other criteria.

Grasp present value (PV) and its link to future value (FV) via the PV formula. See an 8% example with $10,000 over 3 years showing PV < FV.

Explore how to select a project by comparing internal rate of return, payback period, benefit-cost ratio, present value, and net present value to choose the best option.

Initiate the project or phase by authorizing work with the project charter, including the business case, sponsor, high-level objectives, and key milestones.

Explain the change management plan and its role in handling scope, schedule, and budget changes. Define the change control board, change definitions, submission forms, tracking tools, and approval workflows.

Integrate and align the project management plan using charter, organizational assets, and environmental factors; apply expert judgment and collaborative meetings to align stakeholders and kickoff.

Explore the planned sourcing strategy process through make-or-buy analysis, compare outsourcing and internal execution, and apply source selection analysis and contract decisions to optimize procurement.

Explore how quality assurance applies planned methods to prevent defects, conduct quality audits, and drive process improvements to meet project requirements.

Learn how quality assurance outputs and change requests update baselines and the quality management plan, guided by quality metrics and risk considerations. Use audits, checklists, and pdca for continuous improvement.

Keep the lessons learned register as a living, collaborative knowledge asset that transfers insights from past to future projects using cloud tools, while project managers ensure responsible sharing and confidentiality.

Explore assess and implement changes process uses integrated change control and a change control board to evaluate requests, approve or reject changes, update plans, and log decisions in change log.

Evaluate change requests to obtain approved changes and update the project management plan, performance baselines, and changelog. Apply change control, configuration management, and backlog management to handle adaptive environments.

Execute the close project or phase process to formally close all work, verify scope and acceptance criteria, close contracts, and issue the final performance report with lessons learned.

Explore how the benefits management plan captures project advantages, ownership, timing, measurement methods, risks, and assumptions, created before chartering and refined iteratively during the project.

In adaptive environments, local domain experts make task decisions while the project manager ensures the big picture, collaboration, and continuous improvement within agile governance.

Tailor governance to each project by matching processes to its lifecycle phases and predictive, adaptive, or hybrid development approaches, balancing stakeholder engagement, change and knowledge management, and reporting.

Enhance governance by applying artificial intelligence to brainstorming, monitoring, decision analysis, prediction, and reporting. Leverage artificial intelligence to support smarter decisions while project managers retain final authority and leadership.

Explore the scope performance domain, its six scope-related processes, and the distinctions between product scope and project scope, plus the concept of goal plating, for mastering scope management.

Plan scope management and requirements management by detailing how to define, monitor, and control scope, how changes are approved, and how the scope baseline and deliverables are reviewed.

Learn to collect, analyze, and document requirements using inputs like the business case, project charter, and contracts, and generate requirements documentation and the requirements traceability matrix through diverse elicitation techniques.

Define project scope using inputs from the project charter and requirements documentation, apply decomposition and product analysis, and balance conformance and non-conformance costs to shape the scope statement.

Connects project scope to value by attaching explicit value to each deliverable within the value breakdown structure, guiding value-driven scope decisions and acceleration on the critical path.

Understand how the validate scope process yields accepted deliverables, handles change requests, and transforms work performance data into updates for quality reports and requirements.

Measure and control project scope against scope baseline, identify causes of changes, and use metrics such as scope definition accuracy and stability of requirements to prevent scope creep.

Learn to monitor and control scope for PMP prep by generating quality reports, verifying deliverables, and managing change requests; apply variance analysis, control charts, Pareto analysis, and update requirements documentation.

Tailor scope management by selecting and adapting processes to project needs within the scope performance domain, considering predictive, agile, or hybrid environments and unstable requirements.

Explore the scheduled performance domain and its three processes, with a practical view of schedule management. Learn to estimate activity durations and perform schedule calculations, reinforcing PMI conceptual questions.

Learn the schedule management domain: plan how to manage the schedule, define activities, sequence activities, estimate durations, develop the schedule, and monitor and control progress against the baseline.

Learn to sequence project activities using network diagrams and the precedence diagramming method, exploring dependency types, lag and lead, and hard, soft, external, and internal logic.

Estimate activity durations and costs using the work breakdown structure, schedule and cost management plans, risks, contingency, and input from the performers.

Identify the critical path in a network diagram and understand how delays affect the project duration. Learn about total, free, and project float and basic scheduling calculations.

Explain critical path method calculations with forward and backward passes, early/late starts and finishes, total and free floats, and notes on start-of-day notation and critical vs near-critical paths.

Learn how to compress project schedules using fast-tracking and crashing, evaluate options with data and analysis, and understand when reducing scope or cutting quality may be needed and risky.

Explore two resource optimization techniques—resource leveling and resource smoothing—and learn to balance a resource histogram under a maximum hour constraint, preventing delays while preserving or adjusting project duration.

Explore tools and techniques for developing the project schedule, from expert judgment and defining activities to decomposition, rolling wave planning, precedence diagramming method, leads and lags, and agile release planning.

Shift focus to agile considerations, using the iteration burndown chart to illustrate adaptive environments where each iteration plans and executes, delivering working pages for rapid feedback.

Tailor schedule management by choosing predictive, adaptive, or hybrid lifecycles to fit your project. Weigh resources, dimensions, technology, deliverables, and deadlines, and learn how buy-in and AI can enhance scheduling.