PMP Cram Course - FULL Review Before Your Exam! 12 PDUs

Master the foundations of project management, from initiation to closing, and learn how to deliver value by identifying stakeholders and managing scope, resources, schedule, cost, risk, quality, and procurement.

Define projects, programs, and portfolios, and explain how they interact with operations across feasibility studies, business cases, phase gates, and initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing.

Explore development approaches such as predictive or waterfall, iterative, incremental, and adaptive or agile, plus hybrid combinations, and how delivery frequency, scope, time, and cost influence outcomes.

Explore how enterprise environmental factors and organizational process assets shape project work, covering external standards and internal capabilities, templates, change control, knowledge bases, and governance.

Explore how organizational structures and PMOs set authority levels for project managers, from high-control offices to functional teams, and how PMOs coach, standardize templates, and coordinate agile or waterfall delivery.

Tailor your project management approach to fit the environment, selecting an agile way of working, and continually reassess with retrospectives, kanban boards, information radiators, and velocity or throughput.

Master the project manager role to deliver value by coordinating stakeholders, guiding the project management plan, and influencing sponsors, PMO, and functional managers from start to end, with benefits measurement.

Identify the project sponsor's role in the business case, approve charter, and secure resources and funding. Align teams, stakeholders, and ways of working from agile to waterfall to deliver value.

Learn the project management process—from initiating to closing—with focus on charters, stakeholder engagement, scope, schedule, cost, risk, and change control, illustrated by Harmony Fitness website project.

Initiate projects by creating the project charter with the sponsor, building business case and benefits management plan, and identifying stakeholders through interviews and a project canvas, considering enterprise environmental factors.

Align and integrate all project plans into the project management plan through iterative planning, referencing the charter and baselines, and establish a sourcing strategy for insourcing or outsourcing.

Plan stakeholder engagement and communications using the stakeholder register, project charter insights, risk management plan, resource management plan, and Ishikawa analysis, then rank stakeholders and deliver engagement and communications plans.

Plan and govern scope and requirements through a scope management plan and a requirements management plan, eliciting from stakeholders via interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and surveys.

Transform requirements into a high-level project scope statement defining deliverables, boundaries, and acceptance criteria, then decompose into work packages, the scope baseline, and if agile, user stories and product backlog.

Plan resource management, produce the resource management plan and team charter, and use quality management plan, project schedule, and risk register to guide and motivate the project team.

Estimate project resources using analogous, bottom-up, parametric, and three-point methods guided by the resource management plan and calendars, documenting resource requirements, basis of estimates, and the resource breakdown structure.

Translate milestones and scope into a schedule and budget, creating a schedule management plan that considers predictive or agile approaches, expert judgment, data analysis, and release lengths.

Develop schedule by turning scope into activities, estimating durations, and establishing the schedule baseline with inputs like project charter, using decomposition, precedence diagrams, critical path analysis, and what-if analysis.

Develop a comprehensive financial management plan and funding strategy, producing cost estimates with a clear basis of estimates, using expert judgment, alternatives analysis, and make-or-buy insights.

Develop the project budget by building the cost baseline and funding requirements, using inputs like the financial management plan, cost estimates, and contingency reserves, with expert judgment.

Identify risks, perform risk analysis, and craft risk responses, then brainstorm with the team to populate a risk register and deliver a stakeholder-friendly risk report.

Analyze risks by assessing likelihood and impact, update the risk register and risk report, and plan risk responses using expert judgment, risk categories, and a probability–impact matrix.

Move from planning to delivery by managing project execution, delivering outputs, and capturing work performance data, using the project plan and risk register to support quality control and assurance.

Capture lessons learned in the lessons learned register to guide current and future projects, using expert judgment, knowledge management, and after action reviews within the project management information system.

Engage stakeholders and manage communications through updated plans, stakeholder registers, risk and issue logs, and the change control process.

Acquire resources and lead the project team, using resource calendars and assignments to drive delivery. Use multi-criteria analysis, negotiation, and virtual teams to optimize resources and enable team performance assessments.

Implement risk responses during project delivery using expert judgment and PMIS, triggering change requests when risks affect cost, schedule, or scope, and monitoring work performance reports to keep stakeholders informed.

Assess and implement project changes by following the change management and configuration management plans, consulting the change control board, and updating the change log and project plan.

Monitor stakeholder engagement and communications to keep stakeholders engaged, update the stakeholder engagement plan as needed, and drive decisions via feedback, risk considerations, and change requests.

Monitor and control project scope, validate deliverables with the sponsor, apply quality metrics, and manage change requests to ensure requirements are met.

Validate scope by confirming verified deliverables against the scope baseline and requirements, using quality reports, work performance data, defects, inspections, and change requests to determine acceptance.

Master resource control by using the resource management plan as input and outputs like work performance information and change requests, guided by the plan-do-check-act cycle and trend analysis.

Monitor and control schedule and budget by analyzing work performance information, forecasts, and change requests, using earned value analysis, critical path, and resource leveling.

Monitor and control finances and risks by using cost forecasts, earned value, trend analysis, and contingency reserves to update the financial management plan, cost baseline, and risk registers and reports.

Close the project or phase by delivering the final product and final report, recording sign-offs and lessons learned, and archiving project information for stakeholders.

Link governance to business case, charter, and plan. Use benchmarking and financial measures—net present value, internal rate of return, return on investment, payback period, and benefit-to-cost ratio—to select the project.

Define and measure project benefits through a benefits management plan, assign ownership and risks, and use baselines, configuration management, and change management to control scope, schedule, and cost.

Manage project data in the PMIS, track issues and risks, and turn data into work performance information and reports for stakeholders, culminating in a final sponsor-approved report.

Learn to identify and engage stakeholders using an organizational breakdown structure and a stakeholder register, then apply impact over influence grid, salience model, and directions of influence to guide engagement.

Explore essential interpersonal and team skills for project management success, including facilitation, focus groups, active listening, emotional intelligence, networking, motivation, negotiation, and cultural awareness.

Master practical conflict management for projects, using direct, collaborative problem solving and the five approaches (withdraw, smooth, compromise, force, collaborate), plus push-pull communication.

Translate requirements into a project scope using a requirements traceability matrix, then use design thinking, the double diamond, affinity diagrams, and process maps to brainstorm, prototype, and map customer journeys.

Explore voting and prioritization techniques, including unanimous, majority, plurality, and anonymous nominal group technique, plus MoSCoW buckets, benefit-cost ratio, cost of delay, and multi-criteria decision analysis.

Explore decomposing a project with a work breakdown structure and a product breakdown structure, detailing work packages, activities, and mind maps for user stories like payment processing.

Identify the project scope baseline, including the scope statement, WBS and dictionary, and work packages, and distinguish verifying from validating scope, with AI tools like ML, NLP, AR, and VR.

Map project resources with a resource breakdown structure, assign roles using RAM and RACI, and drive team charter outcomes for ongoing improvement through post-mortems and retrospectives.

Explore organizational theory concepts relevant to project teams, including Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Herzberg's hygiene factors and motivators, Theory X and Y, Theory Z, Parkinson's law, and MBTI.

Apply rolling wave planning to schedule scope by detailing near-term work packages with estimates and requirements, while keeping far-future work at a high level with designs.

Discover parametric, analogous, bottom-up, and three-point or pert estimating, using optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic figures to estimate durations and costs in the waterfall project, with agile extras.

Identify leads and lags and apply the precedence diagramming method to define logical relationships—finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, and start-to-finish—and understand the schedule network diagram's order of activities.

Identify the critical path as the longest sequence of activities determining end date, with zero float, using forward and backward paths to compute early and late starts and finishes.

Master schedule compression techniques such as crashing, fast tracking, and resource leveling and smoothing, while understanding diminishing returns and risk; apply AI methods like genetic algorithms and branch-and-bound for optimization.

Explore key finance concepts for project budgeting, including ROM, rolling wave planning, preliminary, budget, definitive, and final estimates, plus contingency and management reserves, top-down and bottom-up estimating.

Explore accuracy and precision in estimates and learn earned value analysis using planned value, earned value, and actual cost to assess project performance against budget and schedule.

Explore variance analysis with CPI, SPI, cost and schedule variance. Learn to compute earned value, actual cost, and planned value to assess budget performance and forecast estimates at completion.

Explore project quality, including cost of change and prevention, appraisal, internal and external failure costs, to minimize rework; apply five whys and Ishikawa diagram with PIPs—people, information, process, and system.

Learn to use Pareto charts to identify the 20% of issues causing 80% of defects, compare quality control and audits, and apply PDCA and DMAIC cycles for continuous improvement.

Identify and manage project risks by brainstorming with political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal categories; place them in a risk register and assess probability and impact with a matrix.

Learn quantitative risk methods like decision tree analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, CPD histograms, and tornado charts to assess probability, impact, and plan contingency reserves and risk responses.

Master procurement concepts through make-or-buy analysis, source selection criteria, and the statement of work, then apply bidder conferences, advertising, and requests for information, proposals, and quotations to select vendors.

Examine the main procurement contract types including fixed price, cost reimbursable, and time and materials, with incentives, economic price adjustments, and dispute resolution.

Explore how artificial intelligence enhances project management with models predicting outcomes from structured and unstructured data, and learn about machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI.

Discover three uses of artificial intelligence in project management—automation, assistance, and augmentation—and apply them to governance, risk, scheduling, and stakeholders while managing bias, privacy, transparency, accountability, and sustainability concerns.

Discover how agile project management integrates lean origins and diverse frameworks, culminating in the 2001 agile manifesto that values individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change.

An agile project centers on a product owner prioritizing a customer backlog for value, with a scrum master guiding the three amigos through sprints, acceptance criteria, increments, kanban, and reviews.

Explore the 12 clarifying principles of agile, prioritizing customer satisfaction via early, continuous delivery of valuable software, welcoming changing requirements, and delivering working software frequently.

Trace the origins of agile frameworks from lean and kanban to scrum, xp, and crystal, and see how their ideas shaped the agile manifesto and the triple constraint.

Explore the Toyota Production System, lean thinking, and the eight wastes, learning to reduce defects, inventory, waiting, and excessive processing within an agile mindset.

Apply lean thinking to identify value from the customer, map the value stream, create flow by eliminating waste, implement pull, and pursue perfection to reduce defects, delivery time, and cost.

Explore Scrum, the agile, iterative framework that turns a product backlog into a sprint backlog, through planning, daily scrums, reviews, and retrospectives to deliver incremental value.

Learn how the product backlog is the single source of work for the scrum team and how the sprint backlog turns items into an increment meeting the definition of done.

Explore Extreme Programming, a top agile framework alongside Scrum and Kanban, focusing on programming as the key activity and four practices—coding, testing, listening, and design—to deliver the simplest possible solution.

Explore XP in practice through the planning game, small releases, automated testing, refactoring, and pair programming, showing collaboration between business and technical teams on scope, estimates, and design.

Teams embrace collective ownership and pair programming, refactor code when needed, continuously integrate and test. Maintain a sustainable 40-hour pace and collaborate with an on-site customer under shared coding standards.

Kanban uses a board of cards to visualize pull system, reveal bottlenecks, and manage capacity, guided by the theory of constraints.

Visualize your Kanban workflow with a process map or value stream map, analyze demand for a sustainable pace, and limit work in progress. Equalize item sizes to remove estimation constraints.

Explore feature driven development (FDD): create a high-level model and features list, then plan, design, build, and obtain feedback, using domain modeling, inspections, and continuous integration with visible progress.

Explore Crystal, the agile scaling framework by Alistair Coburn, from Crystal Clear to Maroon, emphasizing iterative delivery, frequent value, and osmotic communication with psychological safety.

Explore dynamic systems development method and agile frameworks like agile unified process and scrum. Learn fixed time and cost with variable scope, Moscow prioritization, and time-boxed iterations delivering incremental value.

Explore scaling agile with Scrum of Scrums as a layered approach to coordinating multiple scrum teams across portfolio, program, and project levels, reporting blockers and deliveries, including LeSS and SAFe.

Explore large-scale scrum (LeSS): coordinate multiple teams on a single product backlog with one product owner and one scrum master; emphasize customer-centric delivery, continuous improvement, systems thinking, lean, and transparency.

Explore how the scaled agile framework orchestrates value streams from discovery to delivery, using OKRs, the double diamond design process, and portfolio to team backlogs with lean budgeting.

Explore the agile release train, a cross-functional program that delivers features to meet OKRs, with roles from release train engineer to product manager, system architect, and business owners.

Adopt agile concepts with scrum roles, ceremonies, and information radiators; deliver value incrementally via sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives, using co-located or online collaboration.

Explore agile teamwork with kanban boards, wip limits, and t-shaped generalizing specialists; practice pairing, swarming, mobbing, and servant leadership to remove blockers during daily stand-ups and accelerate delivery.

Explore agile concepts for initiating a project: the product backlog, MVP or vertical slice, and product roadmap, and see how user personas and journey maps drive prioritization and release planning.

Model the system with context and sequence diagrams to show information flows and active time, then decompose into epics and user stories and map to product and sprint backlogs.

Refine the backlog in an agile team by creating user stories with the three C's of customer, developer, and tester, on a Kanban card, and applying invest and acceptance criteria.

Master agile estimating with relative sizing and Fibonacci-based story points to size user stories, then apply planning poker, wideband Delphi, and fist of 5 for consensus.

Prioritize product backlog items by value and cost using methods like benefit to cost ratio, NPV, ROI, payback, and NPS, aligning with compliance and customer value.

Master prioritization with Moscow, cost of delay, prioritization matrix, and Kano analysis, while using work-in-progress limits and stakeholder voting to sort must-have, should-have, could-have, and delighters for delivery.

Achieve agile quality by validating customer requirements through small, incremental deliverables. Use peer reviews, pair programming, test-driven development, automated testing, and continuous integration to ensure quality each sprint.

In agile testing, developers write unit tests first (TDD), then code and integrate via automated, system, and user acceptance tests, guided by the SDLC V model.

Master timeboxing and continuous integration to manage sprints, spikes, and events, while reducing technical debt through refactoring, improving cohesion, and lowering coupling for reliable software delivery.

Explore Pareto analysis based on the 80/20 rule to identify the most impactful defects and prioritize improvements, and use control charts to detect out-of-control processes and drive root-cause problem solving.

Explores agile metrics to measure progress during sprints, including OKRs and KPIs, velocity and throughput, and cycle time and lead time from backlog to delivery.

Measure defects and pursue first time right to reduce rework, then use WIP limits and burn down, burn up, and cumulative flow diagrams to monitor progress.

Explore agile risk management through small increments, daily stand-ups, and pre-mortems to surface risks early, then use a risk-adjusted backlog to balance value and risk.

Review the retrospective to identify what went well and what needs improvement, map value streams, and reduce eight wastes and non-value added time with psychological safety for trials.

Discover the PMBOK 7th edition's 12 principles for managing projects, and learn to tailor approaches, engage stakeholders, deliver value, build quality into processes, navigate complexity, and enable organizational change.

explore stakeholder performance domain in PMBOK 7th edition, identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, and engaging stakeholders to build productive relationships and achieve aligned objectives via push and pull communications and continuous feedback.

Develop shared ownership and high-performing teams through servant and distributed leadership, fostering safe, transparent cultures of collaboration and growth, with vision, critical thinking, intrinsic motivation, and emotional intelligence.

Explore development approaches and lifecycles, comparing predictive, agile, and product-mode options. Learn how delivery cadence, phase gate reviews, and Kanban influence design, build, test, deploy, and close.

Plan your project with a predictive or adaptive approach, using a work breakdown structure, uncertainty-based estimates, and schedule techniques to align budget, scope, and quality.

Plan and manage project work with efficient processes, lean methods, and strong communication to improve performance, while using retrospectives and knowledge management to capture explicit and tacit insights.

Deliver project outcomes that align with business objectives and strategy by managing requirements, quality, and value delivery through adaptive and predictive approaches, with clear acceptance criteria and traceability.

Measure project performance with metrics, baselines, and dashboards for actionable data. Compare plan to actual using KPIs, leading versus lagging indicators, and value metrics like ROI and NPV.

Explore managing project uncertainty and risk using volatility, complexity, ambiguity, PESL and VUCA. Use proactive responses, reserves, progressive elaboration, prototyping, simulations, and stakeholder engagement.

Tailor your project management approach to the environment, industry, and organization maturity. Blend predictive, hybrid, iterative, and agile methods for effective delivery and stakeholder value.

Tailor each performance domain by assessing stakeholders, team structure, development approach, governance, planning factors, and risk, then measure value and report status to align with project culture and constraints.

Study four commonly used project management models, methods, and artifacts, including situational leadership, Oscar coaching, cross-cultural communication, and Crystal's communication richness, plus gulf of execution and evaluation and motivation theories.

Explore organizational change models—PMI, ADKAR, Cotter’s eight steps, Satir, and Bridges—and planning, conflict, and stakeholder engagement in change initiatives.

Join a methods speed round from the PMBOK Guide 7th edition, covering alternatives analysis, benchmarking, and risk tools like decision trees and earned value analysis.

Master affinity grouping, analogous and parametric estimating, and story points with Fibonacci and wide band Delphi, while exploring kickoff, backlog refinement, and steering committee meetings for agile planning.

Explore common artifacts and templates guiding project deliverables. Learn key items like business case, project charter, risk and stakeholder registers, and Gantt charts.

Summarize reports on quality, risk, and status, and map contract types from fixed price to IDIQ. Cover MOUs, MOAs, SLAs, bid documents, metrics, requirements, calendars, and user stories.

Learn the PMP fast track by applying seven exam tips: identify keywords, map questions to PMBOK principles, adapt to predictive, agile, or hybrid approaches, and manage time.

Focus on delivering value above all by guiding people, leadership, conflict, and management with direct, collaborative problem solving, root-cause analysis, and team-based brainstorming.

Master agile and predictive project approaches with key ceremonies, roles, and artifacts, from sprints and backlogs to kanban boards and minimum viable products.

Use predictive project management to link the business case to the project charter, secure sponsorship and resources, and apply planned value, earned value, and actual cost metrics.

Master predictive estimation methods like three-point, beta or pert, and analogous, plus parametric estimates, and learn change control, risk management, procurement, and closing in a hybrid agile-predictive PMP fast track.